“So it’s democracy versus capitalism at this point, friends, and we out on this frontier outpost of the human world are perhaps better positioned than anyone else to see this and to fight this global battle, there’s empty land here, there’s scarce and nonrenewable resources here, and we’re going to get swept up into the fight and we cannot choose not to be part of it, we are one of the prizes and our fate will be decided by what happens throughout the human world. Leukemia, most likely and, most likely, death.” And years later, unless the victim's DNA luckily repaired itself, the tumor promotion that was a more or less unavoidable part of living would have its effect, and there would appear a bloom of Something Else inside: cancer. Tumor initiation, begun with just that typo in the book of the self. Most of those collisions were harmless but in all those thousands, there were in all probability one or two (or three?) in which a chromosome strand was taking a hit, and kinking in the wrong way: and there it was. Still, thousands were striking atoms of flesh and bone.
Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal they were huddled behind hundreds of millions were flying between these atoms and then through the atoms of their bodies, touching nothing, as if they were no more than ghosts. Several lifetimes of dentists’ X-rays, to be sure but the radiation outside the storm shelter would have been a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. “He pointed to another number, changing as rapidly as the first, but on a lower trajectory it rose to a high of 8.79 rem per hour.
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