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Read Ebook: War Game by Walton Bryce Emshwiller Ed Illustrator
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Ebook has 12 lines and 3473 words, and 1 pages
ussian had agreed. "This way, one will be the absolute victor."
If the other Ministers knew what this secret agreement was they either did not care, or did not care enough now. They got up from the conference table and drifted out of the big spheroid room to their families, wives--wherever they wanted to go.
Now only Thompson and the Russian remained in the room. They walked ten paces away from one another in the classic tradition of honorable dueling, turned, and fired. They fell almost at the same time. Morten rushed over to Thompson who was already dead, having died instantly with a bullet in his heart. Morten saw that the Russian had a bullet hole just above his left eye.
Thompson, foreseeing this possible situation, had gotten a promise from Morten that he would press the button that would annihilate Russia, in case Thompson was dead or incapacitated. That would leave the United States the sole victor in the last great global struggle to establish once and for all, world wide, the true faith.
Morten fought a brief struggle with his conscience, then ran out of the room, leaving the console untouched. The United States and Russia still survived. Morten's family was still safe. He ran toward the bank of elevators to get out of the Cellar. He hadn't been out of the Cellar for a long, long time.
The President of the United States switched off the TV, and poured another martini. "You want another?" he asked the Minister of Peace. "No, sir, Mr. President."
For a while they said nothing as they looked out the window at the peaceful sunshine, and watched birds settle in the trees.
"They ran their own course," the Minister of Peace said. "Just the same, it was an unpleasant thing to see."
"Inevitable," said the President. "There wasn't any other possible way to handle them."
The U.N. Cellar had been walled off, turned into a kind of sanitarium. Its occupants had never known the truth about the outside. Thompson and that absurd Russian were dead. But what about the others in the Cellar, living there still and believing they were the only few survivors left in the world?
Poor bastards, the President thought. And then he thought of that statement by Sartre. The one about hell being a restaurant where you served yourself.
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