HOW MARCEL MARCEAU SAVED THE WORLD

Once upon a time, one hundred thousand years ago, or at least fifty, there was a village by the sea where the children and the old people did not speak, laugh, or make any expression. So the village was known as Silent By The Sea. The old people had been shocked and paralyzed into silence because they had been through a war. The children had been shocked and paralyzed into silence because they were told there was to be a war in five minutes. And the wait for the five minutes was never ending.

The children were obsessed with clocks and time-pieces. They sat on chairs under wall clocks in school, or stood below clocks on the buildings in the village square, looking up and counting the minutes and the seconds. They walked around with their wrist watches held to their ears listening to the seconds ticking, and waiting for the five minutes to be up.

The parents were busy building bomb shelters and organizing drills to be at the ready, whenever the five minutes would be up. And at night everyone watched television to see films of atomic explosions... Japan, Nevada, the Bikini Islands. Every evening there was a news show with a panel of scientists who explained that because there was enough weapons to destroy the world ten times over, and because the threat had been made that country X would destroy country Y and because the only way to prevent war was to keep producing and stockpiling weapons, the only way to create peace was to use the weapons. To measure the inevitability of the next atomic war the scientists had come up with the Doomsday Clock: a scientific measurement of the liklihood of the next Atomic War, and it was set at five minutes to midnight on a good day, and two minutes to midnight on a bad day.

There were a few storytellers who knew what the end would be like, as they had survived the testing, they had survived the dropping, they had survived the day of ashen disintegration. One man in the village had laid cables for the A Bomb testing in the Bikini Island Atolls. He was a great story-teller, and he would come in to the village every morning with a troop of dogs and young women and rose wine, and tell stories of how the cable was laid, and how the men on the Navy ship were issued sun-glasses to protect their eyes from the atomic explosion, and how when the blast went off, the huge ship was pushed on its side a mile from where it had started. But the old people knew what the man was not saying. That the most extraordinary effect of the A Bomb was..... That It Killed Sound. The old people carried this Silent secret in silence. The seagulls cried, the waves pounded, but the people said not a word.