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."

Psychiatry would never have altered their rigid mold, he knew. It was a strangely funny thing, that spontaneous rebellion all over the world. The people putting a stop to the whole damn vicious historical show. But they had done it. The lie had been given to all the historical pessimists like Spencer and Toynbee and Marx and all the others who had said the same things, whether they really had admitted it or not. The people, acting out of intuitive realization that they faced annihilation, had reacted en masse and taken things over for themselves. Now you couldn't find even a water pistol anywhere in the world.

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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