'But don't you see?' she protested, 'We must prepare to purify ourselves... to rise above this "mine" thinking and be as God's own son, who said, "Love thy neighbour."'

'No,' he replied with finality, 'I can't buy that.'
Then, after a moment's thought while he groped for the words to make her understand the truth which burned in the core of his soul, 'It is my family I save, no one more. You. These kids. Our friends are like people of Noah's time: he warned them of the coming flood when he built the ark on God's command. He was ridiculed and scoffed at, just as we have been ridiculed. No.'
And here his voice took on a new sad sureness, an air of dismal certainty, 'It is meant that if they don't prepre, they die. I see no need for further argument.' And so she had reluctantly acquiesced.

With seven minutes left, the first knock rang on the shelter door. 'Let us in! For God's sake, man, let us in!'

He recognized the voice. It was his first neighbour down the road toward town.



'No!' shouted the father, 'There is only room for us! Go! Take shelter in your homes. You may yet be spared.'

Again came pounding. Louder. More urgent.

'You let us in or we'll break down this door!'
He wondered, with some concern, if they were actually getting a ram of some sort to batter at the door. He was reasonably certain it would hold. At least for as long as it must.

The seconds ticked relentlessly away. Four minutes left.
His wife stared at the door in stricken fascination and moaned slightly. 'Steady, girl,' he said evenly. The children, having halted their game at the first shouting, looked at him in fearful wonderment. He glared at his watch, ran his hands distraughtly through his hair, and said nothing.



Three minutes left.



At that moment, a woman's cry from the outside pierced him in an utterly vulnerable spot, a place the men could not have touched with their desperate demands. 'If you won't let me in,' she cried, 'please take my baby, my little girl.'

He was stunned by her plea. This he had not anticipated. 'What must I do?' he asked himself in sheer agony. What man on Earth could deny a child the chance to live?






"We fight to live. And live.. only to die."
It rings.