Flesh Read Online Free PDF Page A

the government had commissioned a research company to develop a system for broadcasting power over the entire planet? A shaft was to be sunk into the earth deep enough to tap the heat radiating from the core. The heat was to be converted into electricity and transmitted around the world, using the ionosphere as a medium of conduction.
    “Theoretically, every electrical system on the planet could tap this power. That meant, for instance, that the city of Manhattan could draw down from the ionosphere all the power it needed to light and heat all buildings, run all TV sets, and, after electric motors were installed, power all vehicles.
    “I believe that the idea was realized about twenty-five years after we left Earth. I also believe that the warnings of some scientists, notably Cardon, were justified. Cardon predicted that the first full-scale broadcast would strip away a part of the ozone layer.”
    “My God!” Stagg said. “If enough ozone in the atmosphere was destroyed... !”
    “The shorter waves of the ultraviolet spectrum, no longer absorbed by the ozone, would fall upon every living creature exposed to the sunlight. Animals—including man—died of sunburn. Plants, I imagine, were sturdier. Even so, the effect on them must have been devastating enough to account for the great deserts we saw all over Earth.
    “And as if that wasn’t enough, Nature—or the Goddess, if you prefer—struck man just as he was shakily getting to his feet. The ozone imbalance must have lasted a very short time. Then natural processes restored the normal amount. But about twenty-five years later, just as man was beginning to form small isolated societies here and there—the population must have dropped from ten billion to a million in a year’s time—extinct volcano ranges all over Earth began erupting.
    “I don’t know. Maybe man’s probings into the Earth caused this second cataclysm—twenty-five years delayed because Earth works slowly, but surely.
    “Most of Japan sank. Krakatoa disappeared. Hawaii blew up. Sicily cracked in two. Manhattan sank under the sea a few meters and then rose again. The Pacific was ringed by belching volcanoes. The Mediterranean was a lesser inferno. Tidal waves roared far inland, stopping only at the feet of the mountains. The mountains shook, and those who had escaped the tidal waves were buried under avalanches.
    “Result: man reduced to the Stone Age, the atmosphere filled with the dust and carbon dioxide that make for the magnificent sunsets and subtropical climate in New York, melting icecaps...”
    “No wonder there was so little continuity between our society and that of the survivors of the Desolation,” Stagg said. “Even so, you’d think they would have rediscovered gunpowder.”
    “Why?”
    “Why? Because making black gunpowder is so simple and so obvious!”
    “Sure,” Calthorp said. “So simple and so obvious it only took mankind a mere half a million years to learn that mixing charcoal, sulfur, and potassium nitrate in the proper proportions resulted in an explosive mixture. That’s all.
    “Now, you take a double cataclysm like the Desolation. Almost all books perished. There was a period of over a hundred years in which the extremely few survivors were so busy scratching out a living they didn’t have time to teach their youngsters the three R’s. The result? Abysmal ignorance, an almost complete loss of history. To these people, the world was created anew in 2100 A.D. or 1 A.D. their time. A.D. After the Desolation. Their myths say it is so.
    “I’ll give you an example. Cotton-raising. When we left Earth, cotton was no longer raised, because plastics had replaced fiber clothing. Did you know that the cotton plant was rediscovered only two hundred years ago? Corn and tobacco never vanished. But until three centuries ago, people wore animal skins or nothing. Mostly nothing.”
    Calthorp led Stagg from the mural back to the open French windows. “I digress, though