Reinforcements appeared to help the guards herd us, and these had long rifles slung over their shoulders. We shouted at them too, and when they started to unsling their rifles and shift them into firing position, some of the young people charged them and the rest of us followed. It had been seven months since leaving Tunisia, and something had snapped in us.
None of the Swiss soldiers fired at us, but as we left the railroad sidings and rushed the buildings in a mass, many more soldiers appeared, and suddenly the air was filled with tear gas. Some of us fled, some charged the police line, and in front of the building the fighting got intense. It seemed clear the police had orders not to shoot us, so we went at them hard, and somehow a gang of young men got one policeman down and got his rifle from him, and one of them shot at the police and then everything changed. Then it was war, except our side had only that one rifle. We started going down left right and center, screaming. Then someone said They’re rubber bullets, they’re just rubber! And we charged again, and in all the confusion a group of us got inside the building. It was the safest place to be given what was happening outside. But by that time we had lost our minds, we had seen our people shot down, rubber bullets notwithstanding, so we thrashed everyone we caught in that building, and someone found something flammable and torched the big receiving room, and though it was a small blaze, by no means was the building on fire, still there was a lot of smoke, not as painful as the tear gas but probably worse for one’s health over the long haul. We didn’t know, we had no idea, we were just lashing out, trying to keep the police out of the building at the same time we were trying to set it on fire, even with us inside it. I suppose at that point we were on a kind of suicide mission. None of us cared at that point. I will never forget that feeling, of lashing out irregardless, of not caring whether I lived or died, of just wanting to maximize damage whatever way I could. If I got killed doing it that was fine, as long as there was damage. I wanted the world to suffer like we had.
Finally there was nothing to do but lie on the concrete floor and try to get under the smoke. That worked for most of us, but it meant they could come in and scoop us up and carry us off trussed like sheep for slaughter.
Later, after the inquiry, we were sent through to France. We were reunited with our families, and ultimately we found that only six people died in that riot, none of them Swiss. And damage to the facility was minimal. What remained was that feeling. Oh I will never forget it. When you lose all hope and all fear, then you become something not quite human. Whether better or worse than human I can’t say. But for an hour I was not a human being.
36
The Arctic Ocean’s ice cover melted entirely away in the late summer of 2032, and the winter sea ice that formed in the following winter was less than a meter thick, and broken up by winds and currents into jumbled islands of pancake ice, separated by skim ice or brash ice or even open leads and internal ice-bordered seas many kilometers wide, so that when spring came and the sun hit, that winter’s skimpy ice quickly melted and the constant summer sunlight penetrated deep into the Arctic waters, which it warmed quite a bit, which thus thinned the next winter’s ice even more.
This was a feedback loop with teeth. The Arctic ice cap, which at its first measurement in the 1950s was more than ten