The Last Days of L.A.

by George H. Smith

"Amen!" you shout before you realize you're not supposed to this time. No one seems to notice. Beads of perspiration are forming on the back of your neck and trickling down your spine. The tabernacle is jammed and there isn't much ventilation. You're dizzy with the wine, lack of food and desire.

"Go ahead! Let your kids go to Hell! Let them read comic books and smoke and drink and fornicate in the back seats of jalopies! Let them go to filthy movies, let them listen to dirty jokes on television, let them look at the brazen women with their breasts hanging half out of their dresses."

"Oooooh ..." a woman in front of you moans, and you feel like moaning with her.

"But if you don't want these things," Elinda shouts, her voice on the verge of breaking, "sing—sing, sing with me!

"Come home, come home,

Ye who are weary,

Come home."

You are sitting in a metal room with telescreens on the wall and a big red button in front of you. Sweat is standing out on your forehead and trickling down the back of your neck because you know the time is coming, the time when you have to decide whether to push that button and send a dozen ICBM's with hydrogen warheads arcing over the Pole. In the telescreens you see cities ... peaceful scenes of people going about their business. Then the people are running, leaping out of their cars and leaving them on the street, vanishing into buildings and underground shelters. Your hand is poised over the big red button and your muscles are tightened as if your whole hand and arm were turned to wood, and you know that even if you have to, you can't push that button and destroy half the world.

Then in one of the telescreens there is a sudden white glare, and the screen goes blank—burned out—and then in another telescreen you see destruction fountaining like dirty white dust boiling out of the streets ... and you see the buildings breaking and falling in rubble, and now you hear the people's screams, a sound that tears through your guts and drives you crazy, and the rubble is falling and sending up more fountains of gray dust—and you know that this is happening to your own country, your own people, and you have to strike back, you have to push the button and avenge them, stop the slaughter by killing the enemy's people and destroying their cities too, but you can't make yourself push the button, your arm won't move and your fingers are paralyzed, and then all the telescreens are glaring white or blowing up in clouds of destruction, and you scream, scream in the metal room until you can't hear anything but your own screaming, and then somehow you force your hand down and push the button. And just as you feel it go down, the walls of the room burst inward in a volcano of noise and terror and the gray dust comes swirling in over you, blotting out your screams....

You wake up and hurry through the streets with this last dream hanging over you more heavily than any of the others. You've got to run—you've got to get out. But look at all the other people. None of them are running. They're going home from work—going into cafes, walking the dog ... oh God, walking the dog at a time like this....