Deadly Sky (ePub), The Read Online Free

class? Darryl thought. No way!
    He had read the sections on Hiroshima, and on Nagasaki, where the second atomic bomb had been dropped. There were photographs of burn victims that he hadn’t let his mother see, and there were descriptions of radiation sickness that made him swallow as he read: dark-coloured spots appearing all over victims’ bodies; bleeding from ears, nose, mouth; the way they were given pain-killing injections, but their flesh started rotting away from the hole made by the needle.
    It all stinks, Darryl told himself. But what would happen if the United States and Great Britain and others didn’t have nuclear weapons? The USSR – the Russians – could just invade anytime they wanted.
    So could others. ‘Just think of China during the Korean War in the 1950s!’ Grandad Davis had said. ‘The thing that stopped them and the other commies was that they knew the Yanks had atomic bombs to use against them.’
    Darryl looked at the bookmark he’d stuck between the pages. His father’s postcard, with the huge iron-ore truck. He’d grabbed the card just before they left home; he didn’t know why. Actually, he did know; he just didn’t want to think about it.
    Now he was onto the part about nuclear tests by the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s. The British had exploded one bomb on an old frigate, just off the northwest coast of Australia. (Australia! He hadn’t known that.) It was a ‘small’ bomb, just a quarter of the power of the Hiroshima bomb. The frigate was vapourised and dead fish were found floating on the surface eighty kilometres away.
    Then the Americans had detonated a really big bomb on a coral atoll in the Pacific. The whole atoll vanished, leaving a gaping hole in the seabed. After another American test at Bikini – a place called Bikini: how weird! – radioactive fallout was reported as far away as—
    His mother was saying something, pointing out the window. Darryl looked, then looked harder. The blue was clearer now. It was sea, all right, and reaching outinto it, so definite that he blinked, was a curve of brown and green. Land. Australia.
    The plane curved in over the harbour. Tall buildings rose up towards them. Trees. Dry earth. The glittering sea, with boats moored or crawling across it. A curved white shape slid past below, its roof like shells or sails. ‘The Sydney Opera House,’ said Darryl’s mother, leaning over his shoulder. ‘Just opened late last year.’
    They both exclaimed. A bridge was in view. A huge, arched bridge, with tall towers at each end, and a spider’s web of cables and girders between them. The one on his dad’s other postcard! Might— Might his father be down there, waiting for them? No, that was kid’s stuff. His dad had gone. It was just the two of them now.
    They were in Sydney Airport for three hours, until their flight to Tahiti left. They stayed in the terminal. ‘Don’t want the plane taking off while we’re trying to find the door back in,’ his mother told him.
    A poster on a newspaper stand read: RUSSIANS, AMERICANS MAY SIGN AGREEMENT. ‘NUCLEAR MISSILES KEEP FREE WORLD SAFE,’ SAYS US PRESIDENT.
    As they sat on hard chairs at a hard table and listenedto Australian accents (‘thees weel be a beet better’), Darryl stared through tall windows at a narrow strip of trees and grass outside. Any kangaroos? No. Emus? No. Crocodiles or snakes? No. Thank goodness.
    Then something Australian did appear. A small, terrier-type dog trotting along. It stopped and looked through the window at Darryl. Darryl looked back. The dog waved its tail. Darryl waved his hand. He’d met his trip’s first foreigner.
    The plane to Tahiti was bigger. The voices speaking to them over the intercom were different. They sounded French, Darryl realised.
    ‘Our aircraft is powered by four turbo-prop engines. It can climb on three, fly on two, and make a controlled descent on just one.’
    ‘What happens with
no
engines?’ Darryl asked his