Free Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence Page A

electric generator on which life in the bunker depended.
    She was not unhappy in her little regimented world of rooms and passageways. She had been born and brought up there and knew nothing different. In the schoolrooms her father taught what life had been like before the holocaust, but to Ophelia it did not seem relevant. And although she loved the rich language of English literature . . . sceptred isles set in silver seas and seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness ... it was all remote and unreal, as unreal as the images seen in dreams and instantly forgotten. It was ancient history. Western Civilization, like the Greek and Roman Empires, was irretrievably gone. Only the memory was kept alive, the ambition to rebuild it which General MacAllister conceived as a duty, and Dwight Allison said was futile.
    Ophelia did not much care who was right or wrong. She saw only what was actual, an outside world that was treeless and hostile, a landscape eroded by wind and rain and sun. Telescreens showed it in the main communications room, outside cameras panning the rock-strewn deserts of Avon and Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Somerset. Rain had washed away the surface soil. Snow, and frost, and fog of winter gave way in summer to bleak baked hills and barren valleys where nothing much grew . . . just tussocks of brittle grass, a few hardy flowers and pockets of vegetation along the river margins. Packs of scavenging dogs hunted the tiny nomadic herds of sheep and goats that roamed the plains, and red pins on a map of England showed the scattered communities of human survivors. But there were none nearby. It was bad land around the bunker and the ultraviolet light was too intense for agriculture.
    Down in the valley by the river conditions were a little better. Men in white protective suits planted wheat and potatoes in fields of dung and dust, and reaped a small annual harvest. But the conifers had shrivelled on the hillside and the few surviving sheep were horribly deformed. Most of them were blind. Some had stumps instead of limbs and gave birth to lambs with multiple heads and twisted spines, and chickens hatched in the laboratory incubators with white pupil-less eyes. The white-eyed gene was a dominant mutation, Dr Stevenson said. Even rats were affected, and the only things that thrived in the land outside were lizards and flies.
    Mostly the northern hemisphere could not support much life. Years before the aerial surveys had shown the continents laid waste, from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, across industrial Europe and the United States of America ... a world gone dead. Now the supply of petrol and diesel had almost run out and no one knew if anything had changed among the settlements of human survivors. There was no population census and long ago people had moved away from the surrounding countryside, taken what animals they had and fled to the hills to escape from the government requisition orders.
    Inside the bunker nothing ever changed. It was a constant environment, just as Ophelia had always known it. Maybe, as Dwight said, it got a little crummier with every day that passed, but it was hardly noticeable . . . except when the electric generator broke down and had to be repaired. And although the concrete structure was cracked and crumbling in places, the videos and computers went on working, and Ophelia assumed they would go on working for ever.
    Cloned vegetables grew in the culture tanks in Erica's laboratory. Edible protein was culled from blue-green algae, and extract of sugar beet provided sweetness. Food plants nourished in the cultivation area where the sunlight filtered through the plastic roof and the rain rattled. Ophelia liked to go there, walk among the smells of damp earth and green things growing, among the splashed colours of ripe red tomatoes and yellow marrow flowers.
    Sometimes, after watching a video film or visiting the cultivation area, she could almost envisage the lost world her father