"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.