But no, he told himself, more from habit than from actual wish, he would go on—he would. Perhaps humanity had reached, essentially, an evolutionary dead end. Perhaps not. Clearly, after all, only a fraction of the world’s arsenal had been used in the mad spasm, for the planet obviously was not descending into nuclear winter, and while Garrett would not have exposed himself willingly to the levels of radiation his instruments detected in the world above, neither were those levels as high as he first presumed they would be. While countless cities must have been destroyed, surely others in the less industrialized world, and even small towns in more rural areas of America and China and Russia, must have been spared, contaminated to varying degrees though they must have been with fallout carrie
