Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:40 — 19.1MB)
Told by Ernest Chapel as a character named Adam. He is basically a homeless guy who found shelter in a warehouse basement. When he woke, his world as he knew it had been blown off the map. He tells it as he sees it, from his vantage point as a mostly uneducated, common man. How did it happen? Why? He doesn’t know, only that it did. Chicago, and as far as he knows, all other cities like it are flattened.
Adam soon finds he isn’t the only survivor. A professor fills in some of the technical points of the nuclear holocaust, and mutant fish, swimming in nearby bodies of water. The atmosphere has been burned away, and if there are any survivors else where, where are they? What direction should they travel? How long would they last with the residual atomic fallout, and radiartion in the rapidly cooling atmosphere?
The doc has taken chances he probably shouldn’t have, but encourages Adam, and another survivor, Emily to stay put, and thrive as they do their part in repopulating a dying planet. Is there any bright side to the hopeless future? Adam paints the bleak picture.
Bonus Track
- Keith compares this end of time, post-apocalyptic story to others that are in the genre, and how different ones, from different eras in time present such a future differently. . He also comments on the way they make a social statement more about the society at the time they were written, than any literal end to the world.
- Bing Crosby and Jane Wyman – In the Cool Cool Cool of the Evening.
