Flip Side: About Face

helped carry him to the ambulance but he didn't make it to the hospital because the ambulance never came. It was too busy trying to get all the other people.

So now I'm sitting in class trying to do math. It's really stupid, all this "trying to be normal" stuff. The sun's coming closer every day and everyone's going to fry, but they don't want to admit it. They want to live as if nothing's wrong with the orbit of planet Earth. Stupid lot! What's the use of math when everyone's going to be a pile of black chips? What's the good of keeping shops open when there won't be any shops, or streets, or customers, in a few months time?

It was those stupid tests that did it. That's what Dad reckons anyway. He says the earth was going along fine until they started the new series of Z bomb tests. They were bigger than any bombs they've ever tried. They didn't expect them to be so big. Someone in the math department goofed up with the numbers. The bombs were meant to blow a hole in the mountains, but they blew the mountains away! The explosion knocked the earth slightly, and that set it onto a new wobble, which flipped it right round so now we're spinning in the opposite direction. That's got the moon swinging off course. It took a year or two for everything to get going, but once it was started, the earth went right out of orbit, which takes us closer to the sun every time we go round.

The first time we went past, it was like our usual hot summer. Most people said it was the best summer ever. The second year we had a lot of fires and breakdowns, and all the roads had to have extra shingles on them, but it was a great summer. Some scientists were given prizes for improving the whole climate with their bombs, and some of them said they'd actually meant for the bombs to be 100 times bigger than they said. The third year was too hot, but most people didn't complain because up till now we'd had lots of cool summers.

But this year it's going to be way too hot. The oceans are already warm, and some beaches are covered in dead, stinking fish. Food is running out everywhere because irrigation ponds are nearly dried out. Some farmers are hiding their last year's crops underground because they can't grow anything and it's put the price up. There's no water in the rivers to irrigate with, and it never rains.

A few years ago, before they started the Z bomb tests, there were people saying the earth was doomed anyway. They said it would take only a hundred years or so to go down, but it would happen. They said we would run out of food, or the population would get too high and there'd be famines, or pollution would kill us, or some new disease would wipe us all out, or even a big war would come along. I thought it was possible, but I hoped that