It was as if my whole system had given way, and all the accumulated hidden hurts and pains and vileness of the factory that I had suppressed for so long, now burst forth releasing the rottenness that had accumulated within me. The doctors and nurses panicked and they rushed me to intensive care where there was no television set. They were going to have a nuclear war, Armageddon was about to happen, and I was going to miss it. What a bugger !

 

Armageddon, a word to ponder deeply. There was even a book by that name which I had read, but it was pretty disappointing because it wasn’t about the end of the world at all. Following the success of Exodus, Leon Uris tried the formula again—the bunch of melodramatic characters overlaying real modern history. This time the subject was the Berlin Blockade, and the pilots that flew the airlift that kept the western block of the city alive. But the blend was not as good this time. The historical sections were excellent but the personal lives of the characters were not interesting nor convincing enough, got in the way and it all bogged down. Uris needed to change his plan—he didn’t and I gave up on him.
And since Uris had pinched the title for a book in which the world plainly survived, we seemed further away from a desperately needed clear description of the doom that was in store for us.