I was born here. My mother is a cosmetologist and my father is a plastic surgeon. I am fourteen now, and if that maniac hadn’t started that nuclear war I would be leaving in a few months to finish my education at the university in Nagapour. No one has left here since the war and I don’t know if Nagapour is still there, but, if we believe the news before everything went silent, the whole city was evaporated in a mushroom cloud.

Everybody here reads the daily measurements of weather and radioactivity outside the shelter, and, in a few days, several of us will venture outside to get a better look and see if our valley is safe enough that we can make a home outside where the sun shines and the wind blows. God, it must be wonderful just to stand and let the wind blow in your face; I have never felt that because I was not even born when they closed the roof to keep out the deadly dust. Some of the old timers talk about walking in the sun and the rain and how life in here is so different.

People used to talk about how strange life is here. Now they talk about how they want to live when we get out. But even if we can live outside the shelter, I can’t leave unless we find people out there and schools and libraries where I can finish my education -- at least the doctoral degree and maybe a couple specialties beyond that. I have been working as a pediatrician since I was 12, when I finished the basic studies for that, but I want to learn more and work with the nutritional aspect of infants and young children. Surely there is more information than our library provides, and I want to get my hands on the best equipment we can find. But, really, I couldn’t leave because my children may have to stay a few years and I will stay with them.

I know you are curious how this whole thing came about. A lot of people were afraid something might happen, whether through someone’s stupidity or a natural catastrophe, and there were several clubs trying to figure out how the world would cope. Then several foundations got together with Lifeboat and decided it was worthwhile to prepare so there could be life after some massive holocaust or meteor strike if that should ever happen. Together they had the wealth and political firepower and publicity machinery to make it happen and information in our library doesn’t suggest a power struggle among themselves who would have control or be the final arbiter. They understood where the increased nastiness in international relations could lead, and they had a mission.

So they recruited the brightest minds they could find to put together a plan on who and how and what they would need. Several governments wanted to host our Meadow, but they wanted political control. It took years of wrangling, but finally they agreed on this valley where we live and another valley over the hills for a staging area, and the government signed a treaty to leave us alone except for police to help keep out people who didn’t qualify. (Far as we know, even criminals respected our mission and no one ever tried to muscle in.) By then they had plans on who would be needed, how they would qualify, what buildings and equipment would be needed, and even what plants and animals we would need to be a completely independent and self-sustaining community.

Then they set about it, first with temporary housing for workers and then permanent buildings. They brought in the equipment and started the farm. While this was going on, they started recruiting the people who would live here. And after a few more years development was complete, including tapping the magma under us for power; the workers moved out and the selected residents took control -- what a celebration that must have been! After that, our only contact with the outside world was through that staging area over the hills; that and radio and television.

People came and people went. What supplies we needed came by airplane to our landing strip. After a few years we had learned to live without anything from the outside world, not even food. We had no waste; it was all recycled, even water was recycled because we knew we couldn’t even trust the rain. And people wanted to come here, not because of the good life we led or because they wanted to be part of the future (if there was one), but because they could associate with the other brilliant people who were selected for a sojourn here. They even kept bringing in and taking out laboratory and scientific equipment so the scientific people could continue their work.

Well, that’s how it came about. And when the war came, we were ready. Of course a lot more people suddenly discovered they wanted to live here, but we couldn’t overload our food supply. Even the criminals understood our purpose and decided to leave us alone. Then came the day when radioactivity in the wind increased so much they closed the roof, and our community was alone. It took only a few weeks for the ferocity of destruction out there to be so complete that radios went silent and we quit broadcasting. For a while we kept sweeping the radio spectrum, but it proved useless; everyone was silent. It’s hard to imagine all the chatter that must have filled the air. And, then -- nothing. Silence.

That’s the story the old folks tell. And our library documents it completely.

Stories about those first few years make your hair stand up on your head. First it was radioactive debris brought by the wind from bomb blasts. Then it was smoke from the fires -- so much smoke that the sun was blotted out and they had weeks of total darkness. And the scientist whose job was to monitor outside air reported that the oxygen content of outside air dropped and the stench of rotting carcasses was so vile she quit weekly, even monthly, sampling. They wondered how much human and animal life had survived and what life must be like without radio and without transportation or the other amenities they had become accustomed to -- empty stores, broken water distribution systems, no telephones -- a completely disrupted civilization. Maybe cockroaches survived -- again.

Fortunately energy from the magma was adequate to keep our greenhouses lighted so our crops didn’t die from lack of sunlight. But some growth was stunted and that first year food had to be rationed. Some people didn’t think the community would survive. As you would suspect, some needs for a completely self-sustaining city weren’t anticipated, and some other things were inadequately stocked. But they found ways to keep our little city humming.

I’ll tell you more about the details of life in Sibr, as we named our city, later. First, I want to tell you something about me.

My mother and father both came here when they were young. She had just finished her doctorate in cosmetology, specializing, I think, in healthy skin and skin tone. And my father had just completed his internship in plastic surgery and wanted to spend some time in study before post-graduate work in facial reconstruction. Everybody here knows everybody else and it’s a lively community of sharing knowledge and scientific interests. So my parents had shared interests and decided to become life-long partners, marriage I think they called it. But the outside world was stable and the city here was stable, so they decided to postpone starting a family until he completed his post-graduate work in a university in Nagapour. They would stay here for their commitment of five years and maybe return to complete their maximum of fifteen years.

And they did return. Just months before the war.

Well, Sibr was founded to repopulate Earth in just that event. Sibr was built with 40% over-capacity to allow for population growth. So my parents commenced doing their part. First was my sister, then thirty months later my brother, then the last one, me, about three years later. So the roof has been closed for twenty years and radioactivity outside is still too high for us to live there. We’ve learned how to increase our food supply, so we can now feed nearly 75% more than the initial capacity of 1000 adults even though we are becoming crowded in living quarters and some of the lesser-used manufacturing space has been converted to sleep space. Actually, we’re all one big family with representatives of nearly every race and culture. We have our petty quarrels, but we all realize we have no choice but remain here and get along agreeably.

I commenced study as soon as I could read, at about three. It’s hard to imagine how much there is to master because we had to learn the basic field before we could specialize. We just didn’t have enough people to cover all specialties; each of us had to be prepared to wear several hats. School was easy for me, but the list of things we had to master is staggering. Mathematics. Biology. History. Who would have thought history was so important, but we wanted to know the minutest detail so we could know how people wandered into their catastrophes so we could avoid those things ourselves. Physics and Chemistry. Physiology. Humanities. You wouldn’t believe how important Humanities is when you are isolated like we are. Ecology. Manufacturing. Agriculture and animal husbandry. And we each had to learn at least two manual trades to do the routine maintenance of our quarters and habitat.

When I was nine I passed the tests for high school, at eleven passed the tests for a bachelors degree, and at nearly 13 completed study for my practice of pediatrics. Yes, I have helped deliver some babies, and I have a regular list of children -- I call them my children -- to look after. For manual trades, I worked at tending crops and food preparation. With our overlapping agriculture it is a constant hustle to keep things growing on schedule. And my next assignment is to learn about soil requirements for adequate nutrition so I can add what the fertilizers need to give our crops what we need in our food.

Several of the monitoring stations around the shelter indicate that radiation is in some places acceptable for humans. But we don’t know how widespread that is, so we have for the last three years sent out scouting parties. The first year we lost one of our dietitians to radiation poisoning, so everyone knows to be very cautious. So far there have been too many hot spots and no one has left the shelter to live outside. But I have volunteered to be in this year’s scouting party and we are scheduled to commence our survey next week. Since at fourteen I’m old enough to vote, I am old enough to start making my own decisions; besides, I’ll be the only young person in the scouting party. Maybe, at last, I can feel the wind on my face and feel the warmth of natural sunshine.

I am in my pediatrician’s cubicle now, and I am waiting to give three of my children their weekly check-ups. Despite the good health of everyone here we don’t want to take any chances that something will break out and get a head start. So their mothers will bring in little Sam -- he’s a little darling at eighteen months -- Marie, Sam’s four-year-old sister, and Teddy. I allow 15-20 minutes each. And then I will teach a class in Biology for an hour. The middle lens of our main microscope got scratched and we are s till trying to find a way to repair it because we don’t have a spare lens. Without that microscope I have to draw what they would see, but that is not too bad because they can look at the sample with the low power lens, then my sketch and after with the high power microscope lens. Some of the kids are real sharp and they catch me if I make a mistake at the green board. Sometimes I play with them and deliberately make a mistake to be sure they are alert. Kyle just won’t let me distort my sketch; I really enjoy him; he is going to do an excellent job in the laboratory in the next lesson series.

After Biology the “B” team -- that is my brunch group during this semester -- will have brunch. I think we are having goat chops, broccoli, tomatoes and blueberries. Our entire population is divided into teams of 200 because of the size of our dining hall, so our two meals a day keep our dining hall busy most of the day, and all four kitchen crews have time for their other assignments.

To be honest, I am a little frightened at the prospect of living outside. We were inoculated for every disease agent we knew about, but twenty years is long enough for new strains to develop and we know that radioactivity hastens mutations. So we may have a whole host of new pathogens to deal with. All it takes is one that is sufficiently different, and our whole community could be wiped out. I don’t think the initial planners of Sibr included how to handle this new situation; we are left to our own ingenuity. I know I will be monitoring my children very closely even if we just gradually let in outside air. Chemically we know what is in the air, and we have watched for strange viruses and bacteria, but a pathogen whose genetic make-up helped it survive the war and then mutated could be different enough to resist our best medicines, so we will have to rely on our immune systems, and that is unpredictable and scary because something entirely strange could go undetected.

But, sooner or later, we will be forced to leave because we will exhaust something that is crucial. Before then there will likely be too many of us for our shelter to support. Anyway, that is why we came here in the first place.

We know we have to be careful because there is no back-up that we know about. It took intelligence millions of years to develop and just a few thousand years for our science to enable us to destroy ourselves. If we die out, intelligent life on this planet will have to start all over from the beginning.

Background information on the community, requirements, how it is organized, etc., is available at http://www.rationallink.org/MounMead.htm.