Read Online Drinks Before Dinner by E. L. Doctorow - Free Book Online

have decided that nature is not secure in space, that life is not natural in space. They will have designed something for the earth, some completely self sustaining ecosystem, a terrarium deep in the sea, perhaps, where the selected specimens of humanity can begin again. Yes. This would be a venture of scientists and military men with government technology at their disposal. Revolutionary groups protesting its elitism would try to sabotage it. Morally they would be right, but they would fail. Millions would die in protest. But our computers would secretly be scanning the traits of every child in the country just reachingbreeding age. And at the moment the ecosystem was ready, the moment the ark was complete, the computers would designate the children who were to survive. All the weak and deformed would be eliminated, of course, all the congenitally deformed children with twisted spines or macrocephalic heads or arms attached to their shoulders. All the physically normal but ordinary, sensitive children would be eliminated too. Only champions would be chosen, champions of survival, champions of selfishness, cunning, muscular strength, sexual vigor, children with the ability to kill, and a complete lack of concern for the horrors of their own consciousness. Helicopters will come out of the night and land in the streets and on lawns and kidnap these children designated for survival. And while the world erupts, on some back road somewhere an ordinary yellow school bus will make its way unremarked and ignored through the chaos. In the yellow school bus will be the chosen children. Not many. Perhaps ten of them. Perhaps twenty or thirty. And the bus will turn a corner somewhere, in some mining town somewhere on a river. The light in the sky will be amber, and the old school bus will have turned in that light a darkened yellow, like an egg yolk. And it will go around a corner and be gone, and a few hours or days after it has disappeared, the last unprotected person on earth will be dead. The conspiracy of survivors will be dead. But the ark will be under way.
MICHAEL    My God.
ALAN    It’s more than a plan, it’s an inevitability. The same flaw in the human race that destroys it provides the conspiracy of survivors with the responses that save it. The same insufficient humanity that brings doom provides a few people with the insensitive strength to plan beyond the doom.
EDGAR    Yes. And we survive the fire as we survived the flood. Clouds of radiant poison will fall through the treeson the mountaintops and drift down the mountainsides into valleys. And while men in the night drum the earth with their running feet and people run in terror over the corpses of the deformed and mobs tear down the gantries of empty rockets and while people choke on their blackened tongues and cattle go down on their knees and cities explode and the seas boil—the children on the school bus will see this. They will have the vision of the world’s end imprinted on their brains. And in numbers of generations and individuals to come, those memories will erupt at night in terrible dreams. And one day again in the universe these dreams will come true. The dreams will again come true because the children of the survivors will be made in their image and will build a new earth with the genius of the conspiracy of survival. Everything that has happened will happen again. The ark will be built to resemble a lavish apartment overlooking a ruined city. The ark will look like this room. We are on the ark now. The world has already ended.
( EDGAR unties ALAN . He points the gun at the floor and squeezes the trigger . Click)
ANDREA    It wasn’t loaded!
EDGAR    No.
ANDREA    You were never going to shoot anyone.
EDGAR    ( Pausing ) No.
( ALAN rises from his chair, arranges his tie, his vest, buttons his jacket, shoots his cuffs. Recovers his eyeglasses from the coffee table )
ALAN    You led me to believe I was at the point of death.