The Ancient One and Durga had taken flight when something even darker than the night approached them. "Well!" a dark and somber voice called out, "I see my alter ego is as radiant and seductive as ever!" Durga grimaced.
"Don't ever call me your alter ego, Kali! Remember what happened last time you upset me!"
"Yes," the goddess of death answered. "I will remember. Took me 500 years to recover from that beating. I remember every single agonizing blow! But as I remember, for a couple of hundred years you weren't your whole self either."
"Less than 100!" Durga snapped. "Let's not exaggerate our capabilities! Now, what do you want? Your stench is making us sick!"
"Oh, tut tut!" Kali tormented, "I just thought winged and obnoxious here would want to know that one of the local lunatics got some help from somebody and is building an ultratron that will override every computer system on this world. They're trying to create a unified effect, to explode every nuclear bomb on earth simultaneously combining their effects. I might relish in death and suffering, but I don't want to starve to death!"
"Any idea where?" The Ancient One asked.
"Follow!" Kali snapped.
They made their way to one of Asia's most prosperous cities to a building that had a huge antenna on top of it.
"There you go!" Kali teased. "Have fun, children!"
"Kali," The Ancient One snapped, "I'm over a million years old. You're not even a fourth that!"
"Oh, boast away!" Kali answered. "You always do like to talk about your achievements. Now, bye bye!"
The darkness oozed away and the normal darkness of night returned. As they landed on a nearby roof and The Ancient One studied the scene Durga asked "I don't understand. What difference would it make if the atomic bombs exploded all at once or at different times around the world? Wouldn't the devastation be just as great?"
"It would be far worse," The Ancient One answered. "When one atomic bomb explodes it pushes a lot of the atmosphere upward, but gravity has time to pull it back before it can escape into space. If all the atomic bombs exploded together absolutely simultaneously, the pressure waves created would be so intense that a great deal of the atmosphere and probably a lot of water, would be blasted away into space. It would reach escape velosity and never fall back to earth. You can imagine the result if the earth lost fifty per cent of its atmosphere. Nothing would survive! The air pressure would be too low for anything that survived. Every living thing on earth would expand and explode the minute it became exposed to the outside pressure."
"Ow!" Durga moaned. "Is there any possibility of that happening accidentally?"
"No," The Ancient One answered. "It would be virtually impossible. "Come on! Let's take a look at this thing." They descended on one of the building's mid levels. A couple of startled guards tried to put up a small fight, but it didn't last long. The Ancient One entered a room that was filled with hundreds of computers! It was actually three floors of the building that had been hollowed out inside. The Ancient One put his hand on one of the beams and went "Hmmm! We could bring this thing down with a couple of good punches and a couple of good kicks! They've taken too much out of the support structure to make room. But I don't think we'll have to go to all that trouble." He walked among the computers and found the six he was looking for, six small black boxes sitting on top of some of the other computers. "Here we go!" The Ancient One snapped as he started unconnecting the computers.
"These six little things are the problem?" Durga asked.
"These six little things don't belong to this world!" The Ancient One answered. "They have ten times more capability than all the rest of the computers in this room. Without them those who set up this system won't be able to use it. I noticed some mesh bags behind that desk over there. Go get them." In a few minutes they had the computers in the bags and winged skyward just as several dozen security men busted through the door on the room's opposite side.
"Where are we going?" Durga asked.
"Not too far," The Ancient One answered, "active volcano, bubbling lava in its core. There's no way anybody will ever retrieve these in there and without these that system won't work. So people will be reasonably safe." In a little while they dropped their cargo and headed off. "What about whoever built that?" Durga asked. "Kali took care of him!" The Ancient One answered. "He's had a little accident. Somehow a parked car slipped out of gear and rolled down a hill, hitting his car head on. Several witnesses swore they heard strange laughing as the car incinerated!"
"Well, at least she's good for something!" Durga snapped. "It's not true is it?"
"What?" The Ancient One asked.
"That her and I were sisters or something, twins and that's why people kept mistaking us for each other?"
The Ancient One smiled. "Twins run in my family," he remarked. "They've run in my family for untold ages."
"Shit!" Durga cursed, "Shit!" as they flew onward.