Free End Zone by Don DeLillo Page A

communicate with beings at the very ends of the universe. We’ll build hydraulic robots to make automation obsolete. We’ll manufacture plastic lungs and brains. We’ll reprogram human cells with new genetic information to wipe out inherited disease. Obsolescence itself will become obsolete. We’ll recycle everything. Shoes to food. Candles to paper. Rocks to light bulbs. The philosophical question has been asked: what will become of death? Gentlemen, I have the answer right here. The sealed envelope please.”
    Andy Chudko looked at me. He got up, took the guitar from the chair by the door and then opened the door and left, closing it behind him. Bloomberg began to speak again. I was sorry Chudko hadn’t left the guitar. In some obscure way, its presence would have been a comfort.

16
    T HE MOTEL was about two miles from campus. I walked out there along the edge of the road. Fragments of glass flared in the sun. I passed a number of dead animals, just scraps of fur now, small pieces of flesh completely macadamized, part of the highway. Finally I reached the motel. It was a gray building, barely distinguishable from the land around it. Major Staley had been staying there since the school year began. I didn’t know what kind of car the major drove so I went into the office and got his room number from an old woman half-asleep over a bowl of Shredded Wheat. The major had a towel in his hands when he came to the door. He was wearing his uniform trousers and shirt, the shirt unbuttoned and outside the pants, sleeves rolled up around the forearms. Some blue ROTC manuals were stacked on a table. Above the bed was a three-dimensional picture of mountains.
    *
    “Wife and kids are still up in Colorado. I sure as hell miss them. I hope to have them down here real soon now.Our house should be ready in ten days. I’ve lived in more places than a stray cat.”
    *
    “There’s a kind of theology at work here. The bombs are a kind of god. As his power grows, our fear naturally increases. I get as apprehensive as anyone else, maybe more so. We have too many bombs. They have too many bombs. There’s a kind of theology of fear that comes out of this. We begin to capitulate to the overwhelming presence. It’s so powerful. It dwarfs us so much. We say let the god have his way. He’s so much more powerful than we are. Let it happen, whatever he ordains. It used to be that the gods punished men by using the forces of nature against them or by arousing them to take up their weapons and destroy each other. Now god is the force of nature itself, the fusion of tritium and deuterium. Now he’s the weapon. So maybe this time we went too far in creating a being of omnipotent power. All this hardware. Fantastic stockpiles of hardware. The big danger is that we’ll surrender to a sense of inevitability and start flinging mud all over the planet.”
    *
    “We’re talking about a one-megaton device. All right, you’re standing nine miles from ground zero. If it’s a clear day, you get second-degree burns. Guaranteed. One hundred megs, you may as well forget it. If you were seventy-five miles out, you’d still get second-degree. Depending on the variables, your house might even ignite. That’s just the first flash. After that comes the firestorm, like Tokyo, like Hamburg, like Dresden, like Hiroshima. Structurally the older cities in the U.S. are very susceptible to firestorms. Building density is high and combustible material per building is high. Tucson might escape a firestorm.New York, Baltimore, Boston — forget it. Nagasaki didn’t get too much burn. They had a low density and the wind was blowing right. Hamburg was something else. Hamburg was a hot place to be. Over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit if you can imagine what that’s like. They found bodies naked except for shoes. That was heat that did that, not fire. Heat disintegrated the clothes. They found bodies shrunken, dry as paper. That was the intense heat. The other thing in a