2
Yes; it was still him, even though it did not seem like him any more. She was wracked by her childish helplessness. She was however, alert enough to know she would never be able to forget that there was nothing she could do.
A cough racked out from him, a sound she had come to hate.
'Promise...me,' he rasped, scratchy like an old record.
'I promise Daddy.'
'Ssh dear, he doesn't know what he is saying. He isn't talking to you,'whispered her mother from behind her. But it was too late, she had heard him and she had promised.
'You must fight it...' the voice faltered and then rallied into a gravelly half shout. 'You...have to see it...to know...what it really is.' He said this over and over again. 'You have to see it...to know...'
A bright white nurse held her arm and turned her from the bed to the arms of her mother whose tears wet her hair.
'Let him rest now my dear,' said her mother. His rest was eternal. She never spoke to him again. Penny pledged an innocent's vow to fight until it was beaten. All she knew then was that it could kill millions. She couldn't imagine why anyone would want to do that. The death of her own father was devastating enough, her mind was unable to grasp the killing of millions at one go. Why would you even think of it? H bomb Mike (such a friendly name) was a true wonder of modern science. His mushroom cloud soared twenty seven miles up, his canopy spread a hundred miles. His radio-active mud rained eighty million tons of vapourised coral and earth. The word 'mega' arrived in the language. Mouths gaped in nameless fear and awed disbelief at what they had done.
They said it was lung cancer from heavy smoking, but Penny at ten years old, felt the lie as a body blow which shook her belief in the world, perhaps more than his death. It simply stood to reason that what killed him was the irradiated white stuff which had rained down horribly as, for the Army, he observed the event from as far as thirty miles away.
So she and his wid