Você descreveu o conto de Ian Watson " Voltando para casa ", publicado pela primeira vez em Omni , dezembro de 1982 e está disponível em www.williamflew.com . Os parágrafos de abertura:
Thank God, the runway was clear. An Aeroflot crew had apparently touched down just moments before a radiation bomb went off overhead. But the pilot's nervous system lasted long enough for him to steer his plane off the concrete onto grass—unless he had merely swerved.
Anyway, our landing was a pushover As well it needed to be, with upwards of thirty million displaced Americans pushing behind us. There were two hundred of us packed into our plane—with a second Ilyushin to follow some hours later.
Most wonderful of all, there was no reception committee of Chinese waiting for us. So those Canadian bastards hadn't been lying after all. The Chinese hadn't flooded over the frontier to fill up this spur of the Soviet Union. And yet somehow we hadn't believed that the Chinese would. It was as if the spirit that impelled us toward the East had promised us this land and had preserved it for us.
Leaving Group Red at the airport, the rest of us rounded up some brand-new buses, got them going, and drove in convoy into downtown Khabarovsk—ending up outside the Far East Hotel or Karl Marx Street, which seemed as good a place as any other to billet ourselves for the time being.
There weren't too many shriveled mummies in the streets. The streets themselves were reasonably clean and neat. The human animal seemed to prefer to die in its burrow if it could get there in time.