You are having the same recurring dream, the dream that has haunted the whole world since that day in 1945. The dream of the sudden flash in the night, the rising mushroom cloud and then annihilation. You are living the nightmare again but this time it's true, you know it's true. You can't be dreaming. The bombs are actually falling and huge fireballs are sweeping upward while seas of flame spread at supersonic speeds to engulf the city. You feel the blast, the searing heat, you feel your flesh melting away. You try to scream but the sound dies in your throat as your lungs shrivel. Horror makes you try again and somehow you do scream and wake yourself up.  
Once more, this one more time, it is only a dream. You lie there panting, too weak from terror to move out of the puddle of your own sweat. You lie there and think and your thoughts aren't very pretty. It's a week day and you ought to be down at the office turning out advertising copy by the ton but instead you lie there and think even though you don't like what you're thinking. It's got to be soon. It can't be much longer now, not the way things are going.
You finally crawl out of bed around noon and ease your way into the kitchen. You realize that you have a hangover and since you can't remember what you did the night before you suppose you must have been drunk. By the time you finish one of the two quarts of beer you find in the refrigerator you know that isn't what you need, so you put on some clothes and wander out to a bar.
After a few quick drinks you walk somewhat unsteadily out into the street again and head toward the place you always think of as The Bar. A wino edges up to you and asks for money to buy a sandwich and a cup of coffee.
You give him a dollar but make him promise not to spend it on anything so foolish as food. "Liquor, brother, is the salvation of the race," you tell him. "Believe and be saved!"
"Amen!" he says and hurries off.
You make the mistake of stopping to read the headlines on the corner so you know you're not drunk enough yet. U. S. REJECTS NEW RUSS NOTE. MOON GUNS CAN DESTROY CITIES: KAGANOVITCH. BURMA LEADER KILLED IN FRESH UPRISING.
Just before you get to The Bar you pass an alleyway and as you glance into the darkness, you see a huge rat standing there staring at you with arrogant red eyes. After a moment he walks away, unhurried and cocky. An icy chill runs down your spine. The rats will survive. The rats always survive. Maybe they are the Master Race. Something else tugs at your memory, something you read somewhere. Oh yes, it was a statement by an oceanographer. He said that even if the H-bomb should annihilate every living thing on the surface of the earth, the sea creatures would be able to carry on. The rats and the fish will carry on and build a better world.
Your friends are sitting in their usual places when you get to The Bar. John Jones-Very who has the reddest, bushiest and longest beard and also the record for staying drunk the longest, is doing the talking. Listening are Dale Bushman who paints huge canvases which he never finishes, Ian, an out-of-work musician whose last name you don't know, Pat O'Malley the actor and, of course, Anna.
Anna is small and thin with deeply tanned skin drawn tightly over high cheekbones. She wears a plain dress and no makeup and her hair is done up in a bun on the nape of her neck. The poetry she writes is a kind of elegant pornography. She is the only one in the group who makes any money and that is because her book FLAME ROSE has been banned all across the country. You like her very much, probably because she is the most irritatingly ugly woman you have ever met.
A howling bank of jets hurls across the sky screaming for human blood and you shiver as you squeeze in at the table. You are convinced that the elementals of hell are loose above and the world is in its last stages. All the children born this year will probably have twenty-one teeth and Anti-Christ will walk the land.
"Why worry about the next war?" Dale Bushman asks. "It won't last forever."
"No," John says. "No war ever has ... yet."
"Do you think it's coming?" you ask.
"If you read the papers, you'd take to the hills right now," Pat O'Malley says, finishing his bowl of chili and reaching for his drink.
"Ah, the hills," Ian says. "But what good? The H-bomb is bad enough but they'll use the C-bomb, the cobalt bomb, and this is the final weapon."
"Just the same," you say. "I think we ought to take to the hills." Why not hide yourself way back of nowhere? Hide so deep in the woods and mountains that you won't even know when it happens. You could wrap the silence around you and pull the earth over you. You could bury yourself so deep that ... but of course you won't. You have a job and, like everyone else, at least a thousand other reasons for staying on until the end.
"But really," you say, "a man should be able to survive a time of terror by disengaging himself as completely as possible from the rest of the human race. If he were to reduce his needs to a minimum ... a little bread, a few vegetables, a blanket or two, a warm cave and...."
"A blonde or two," Pat says.
Bushman adds, "A cellar of good Scotch."
"And books, lots of books," Jones-Very puts in.
"No blondes, no Scotch, no books," you tell them, banging your mug on the table so hard their glasses jump. "Minimum needs ... minimum needs!"
"How about plumbing?" Anna demands. "I won't go without plumbing."
"We're facing the end of the world," says John, "and you worry about plumbing!"
"I'm sorry, but if plumbing isn't going to survive, I'd just as soon not either," Anna says. "I just can't see myself squatting in the bushes."
"What difference does it make?" Ian asks. "Everybody dies anyway. From the moment you're born, you start dying."
"Yes, but—"
"So why bother? Everybody dies. Why prolong it more than you have to? Everybody dies."
"Worlds may or may not blow up," O'Malley says, "but it seems to me it's the little indignities of modern life that hurt the most. The constant repetition of the advertising slogans that insult your intelligence, and the women with the pearly teeth and perfect permanent waves, without body odor or souls."
"I have body odor," Anna says.
"But no soul," Ian says. "No soul at all."
"You're just mad because I wouldn't sleep with you last night."
"No soul," Ian says.
The jukebox offers Tin Pan Alley's solution to the whole thing:
OH BABY, OH MY BABY O
MY BABY IS MY BABY O
MY BABY IS MY BABY O
MY BABY LOVES ME O
SHE DOES, SHE DOES, SHE DOES O
"Our trouble is too much history," John says. "A period without history is a happy one and we've had too much history."
"No soul—too much history," Ian hiccups. "Not enough sex—everybody dies."
"Everybody is going to die damn fast, unless something happens," you say.
"No soul—so sad," Ian mumbles. "No soul and no sex ... everybody dies, nothing happens."
"So what?" Anna demands. "What is life anyway? Why try to be like everyone else in this beautiful but messy Brave New World of 1970? Why run searching for a messiah when all the messiahs died a thousand years ago?"
This starts you thinking about religion. You've never thought much about it before but a man can change, maybe even accept the old myths as real until they actually begin to seem real. Instead of dwelling on your body being burned to a cinder in an atomic holocaust you could think of your slightly singed soul being wafted to paradise on a mushroom cloud while U-235 atoms sing a heavenly chorus to speed you on your way.
The others don't even notice when you get up and walk out to look for a church.
Churches aren't hard to find in Los Angeles on any day of the week or at any hour of the day. They're behind the blank fronts of painted-over store windows. They're located in big old nineteenth-century houses along Adams; they spring up under tents in vacant lots and in large expensive temples and bank-like buildings in the downtown area.
You pass by several likely-looking churches because they are in neighborhoods that have alleyways, and you still remember that rat, that red-eyed rat.
Then as you walk through downtown crowds, you remember something else. Some dentist once said that the teeth of the people in the A-bombed Japanese cities hadn't been affected by radiation. This is very funny, it makes you laugh. You picture a world of blistered corpses, none of whose teeth have been affected. You laugh out loud and people turn to look at you.
A woman points you out to a policeman and he looks your way. You want to keep on laughing but now you don't dare to. So you just keep on walking, trying to keep the laughter from bubbling out of you.
"Hey, bud," the policeman calls to you, "what's the matter with you?"
"Nothing—nothing at all, officer," you tell him, and dive into the next church you pass.
This one is called the Church of the New Cosmology. Inside, a round-faced little man is talking to a few listless people.
"A geologist will never know the rocks until he has seen the Rock of Ages. The botanist will never know plants until he has beheld the Lily of the Valley, the cosmologist will never know the universe until he has listened to the Word of God!
"Let us consider for a moment the sun. What do we know about the sun, my friends? What do the so-called scientists know about it? What do they tell us about our heavenly light? They say it's a giant ball of fire millions of miles across and ninety-one million miles away. Now why, I ask you, would that be so? The Bible says that God made the sun to light the world. Now have you ever known the Lord to do anything silly or foolish? Of course you haven't! Then why do they ask us to believe that He would put the sun, which is supposed to light the world, ninety-one million miles away from it? An engineer who did something like that wouldn't be much of a God. The true answer, my friends, is that Jehovah God did nothing so impractical and no matter who tells you different, don't believe it!"
The little man's voice dropped to a husky whisper. "I have studied my Bible and I've listened to the scientists and I've talked to God Himself about it and I tell you this is the truth. The sun is our heavenly light, the sure sign of God's love, and right this minute it is just two thousand three hundred miles from Los Angeles! It is not a wasteful million miles across, it is just forty-five and five-tenths miles across ... just the right size to give us our beautiful California sunshine.
"How do I know?" The whisper had grown to a hoarse shout. "How do I know? I know because it's the Word of God, my friends! The personal word of God given to me by God Himself.
"What else do I know? What else has God told me, to confound the Godless scientists? Why, my friends, the Bible says that this earth upon which we live is flat—as flat as this book!" He brings his hand down with a sharp slap on the Bible. "You ask then how is it possible to circumnavigate the world when it is a flat plane. The answer is that it isn't possible. A ship that seems to go around the world really makes a circle on the flat surface like this." With a stubby forefinger he draws a circle on the book. "Now I know that those scientists up on the moon say that the world is round, but whoever saw or heard of a scientist that wasn't a liar? Can any of you really bring yourselves to believe that this flat earth of ours is traveling through space at the tremendous speed that they say it is? Tell me, do you feel any wind from this great speed? Do you feel anything at all?"
No, you have to admit, you don't. You don't feel a thing. Even his own congregation doesn't seem to.
This is thirsty work. You have a couple more drinks and then you look for another church. You find one called the Church of Christian Capitalism.
The thin old man with the dusty fringe of gray hair has his audience well in hand as you walk in and take a seat. He makes the sign of the cross and the sign of the dollar over their heads as he harangues them.
"Blessed are the wealthy for they shall please God," he says. "Christ was the first capitalist, dear friends. He took a loaf and seven fishes and blessed them and made them into enough food to feed a multitude. He walked in poverty but he came to own the world!
"God is the Good Capitalist, the Owner and Proprietor of all things on this earth. This country was created by those saints of Capitalism—Morgan, Rockefeller and Gould."
Christian Capitalism sends you home to bed by way of another bar.
You're sitting in a room with people all around you. At first you don't know why you're there and then you remember it's a party. Everyone except you is laughing and drinking and having a good time. You have a strange sense of foreboding, of something about to happen that you can't avoid. You see a girl you know across the room and get up and start to cross the room to her.
There's a sudden blinding flash of light outside the house and the windows come crashing in. You see murderous slivers of glass piercing the flesh of those about you and you hurry over to the girl you know only to find her face and neck slashed by the flying glass and blood streaming down over her bare breasts. You try to stop the flow of blood with a handkerchief but it's coming in such strong spurts that you can't.
A second shock wave follows the first with an even brighter flash. You're knocked to the floor and the building comes crashing down. You struggle against the falling masonry but it does no good. You feel the crushing weight and scream ... and your screams wake you up.
You feel almost as bad awake as you did asleep, only now the crushing weight is on your head instead of your chest and your mouth is filled with the taste of death and decay. You figure you must have been drinking last night but you can't quite remember.
You reach out your hand and it locates a bottle that still guggles a little. Without opening your eyes you lift it hurriedly to your mouth and then almost choke trying to spit it out. Mouthwash!
You manage to get your eyes open, and remember with thankful heart that today is Sunday and you don't have to go to work. It's been five days since the last dream and that's not so bad, but just the same you'd better get up and get a drink because this one really shook you up. Or maybe you ought to go to church. Perhaps you'd better do both.
A tall blond man in a black suit is standing on a platform in the center of a group of forty or fifty intensely quiet people as you enter.
"Is there a wall in front of you?" he asks.
"Yes, there is a wall in front of us," the people answer.
"Can you see the wall in front of you?"
"Yes, we can see the wall."
"Is there a wall behind you?"
"Yes, there is a wall behind us."
"Can you see the wall behind you?"
They all turn around and look. "Yes, we can see the wall behind us."
"Is there a floor beneath your feet?"
"Yes, there is a floor beneath our feet."
"Are you sure? Feel the floor with your feet."
There is a loud shuffling as they do as they are told.
"Are you sure the floor is there?"
"Yes, we're sure the floor is there."
"Now feel your feet with the floor."
There is more shuffling and during this you steal quietly out. This one reminds you of the D.T.'s and you want nothing at all to do with that.
You get tossed out of the next place you try because the preacher says you're drunk. You're not, but you wish you were, so you head toward The Bar. You stop when you see the sign, "FLYING SAUCER CONVENTION." It's over the door of a large building and underneath in smaller letters it says, "Listen to the words of the Space People. Hear the advice they bring us in these troubled times."
Surely, you tell yourself, the Space People will have a solution, surely they can bring peace. You enter and see a young, ordinary-looking fellow addressing a crowd of about three hundred. You take a seat next to a bald man who is writing down what the young man is saying even though it doesn't seem to make much sense.
"... member of a small group that has been in touch with the Space People and feel that this world can be saved only through the aid of superior beings. I will now play this tape which I obtained from the captain of a Flying Saucer."
He places the tape on the spindle and it begins to whirl. A voice begins to speak in slightly stilted English. "I am Lelan. I am what you people of Earth think of as the head of the government of the planet Nobila. I speak to you across the parsecs in order to bring you good and bad news. The good is that a new age is about to begin for the people of Earth through the aid of we Nobilians. We have already contacted the President of the United States, the Pope of the Catholic Church and all other world leaders. A new age is about to begin for you as soon as we have saved you from the evil influence of the vicious Zenonians from the planet Zeno. All Earth knowledge will become obsolete as we supply you with new information and all good things will be free in the days after we drive the Zenonians from among you.
"But first we must warn you that the Zenonians will try to stop us, but you can help avoid this if you are alert. Look around you for persons who seem strange. It is the Zenonians who have made you what you are. It is the Zenonians who cause your wars and your crime with their evil rays. We will use our good Nobil rays to combat their evil Z rays. When we have driven them out, the world will be a better place in which to live. But—beware! They are all about you. Examine the man next to you. Beware! They are all about you. You shall hear from us again."
You turn and look at the man next to you; he's looking at you. He is a rather strange-looking guy and you edge away from him just as he edges away from you. You turn to look at the man on the other side of you. He is moving away from you also.
Then you hear the stories of the people in the audience. Every one of them who stands up to speak has had a mysterious visitor in the night or had a flying saucer land in his backyard. Most of them have had trips to the moon and elsewhere in flying saucers. Space you think must be as crowded as the Hollywood Freeway at rush hour. Almost all of them have been contacted by superior beings from space because they are the only people in the world who are wise enough to interpret the Space People to the Earth people.
You feel pretty good from the drinks you've had, so you stand up and tell them what you think.
"The first flying saucers were sighted after the atomic bombs were first exploded," you begin. "And they became very prevalent after the first Earth satellites were put into space and again after the first moon rockets. I therefore think that the Earth is a cosmic madhouse in which the human race has been incarcerated for its own good and that every time we start rattling the bars, the keepers hurry down to take a look."
No one seems to care much for your theory, and you are escorted to the door none too politely.
No, the Space People don't seem to have the answer. With the headlines you see at every corner chasing you, you head for The Bar and dive gratefully through the door.
"So everybody dies," Ian is saying. "We're all dying, just sitting here."
"Will you stop that? God damn it, will you stop that?" you yell at him.
Ian looks at you owlishly for a few seconds and then back at his drink. Jones-Very and the others go right on with the conversation.
"It's merely what I was saying the other night," Jones-Very says. "It's the contagious spread of the madness that is epidemic in our time. No one wants war. But still we are goi............