The fire and brimstone raged and coalesced below astronaut Neilo Whitman, and he throttled up on his main engines to increase the distance between himself and the hell he had left behind forever.
                    Dammit, he had warned Petrov about loitering in the inner atmosphere!  The pilot of that second shuttle had not listened to his warning and had hovered too long near an orbiting atomic missile silo that had been targeted for destruction in a vain attempt to stop its rain of death.  The resultant EMP blast had fried her shuttle's circuitry before atmospheric turbulence had shattered the craft into an infinite number of pieces.
                    Petrov had, in effect, looked back and been scattered among the molecules of the salty Pacific Ocean.
                    A similar fate would not claim Whitman.  He set the flight computer for maximum acceleration and for home.  The Eden space station lay ahead, serving as refuge in a storm.
                    "Whitman to Eden," he reported grimly over the radio, "We were unable to deactivate the orbiting silos.  Automated sequences could not be stopped.  Nuclear war has broken out down below."
                    He was reporting the end of the world.
 
 

All his life, Neilo had faced difficulty from a harsh world.  As a youth, he had struggled to come to terms with being an alien on his own planet, a stranger in his own community.  He knew that he was one of those "strange" people that his family, friends and church had warned him about. He had sat through many sermons of hatred that he had heard proclaimed in the name of love.  Even his own form of love was regarded with hate.  Although many forms of theology preached that "man" was the pinnacle of creation, men were openly condemned for loving their fellow man.  (How ironic that he, one such "sub human" was now an astronaut, the peak of technological creation, flying safely above a turbulent world!)
                    "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," some had mocked him and his kind, appearing proud of their apparent originality and profundity, when they were in fact being neither. "The sin of Sodom" was the widely condemned but rarely defined sin.  It was the unforgivable sin, the one that forced God to give up on people.  It was basis for the hatred that dare not admit its name. How ironic that so many of these people had actually practised so vehemently what they condemned so openly.
 
 

An old man named Ezekiel had clarified the morality tale; a tale that had been old and retold even when he had been a young lad.  Back in those days of city states, nomads, highway bandits, superstition and prehistory, he had explained:  the sin of Sodom was the sin of inhospitality: refusing to love your neighbour as yourself; refusing to extend friendship to fellow travellers in a hostile world; refusing to open one's heart, house and hearth to world-weary travellers.
                    It was a message that was understood everywhere by people who were reliant upon the help of others: ancient bush travellers who relied on their mates for survival; or modern astronauts living aboard space ships whose lives were intertwined and interdependent.
                    But Ezekiel's words were often ignored by many of the very people who claimed to follow such teachings.  They preferred to believe their own interpretation of the Sodom myth, and in doing so, they had perpetuated the real sin.
                    Inhabitants of spaceship Earth had spent lifetimes hating and killing their fellow travellers in the name of race, religion, sexuality or gender.  They had thrived on invasions, wars, witch-hunts, ethnic cleansings, final solutions and genocide.
                    Their sodomy became a way of life - and a way of death.  Whole empires spent obscene amounts of money to protect their wealth from their poverty-stricken neighbours.  Ezekiel's warnings had been long ignored.
 
 

Neilo had lived in a technologically advanced country and in relatively enlightened times.  He had become an astronaut and led a space colony, trying to show the way ahead.  Meanwhile, Earth's ecosystems strained and broke under the pressure of humanity.
                    In their final act of sodomy, Earth's politicians and religious leaders began their ultimate war, raining down fire and brimstone from their orbiting missile silos.  Thermo-nuclear sulphur overthrew cities and valleys alike.
                    Neilo pondered the future for himself and his few surviving companions aboard the space station to which he was returning.  The Eden space station contained sufficient life support supplies to last a colony for many years.  In that time, its inhabitants could start to repopulate their species as they investigated future options: maybe moving to the automated Moon water processing colony, or perhaps resettling on any relatively unaffected areas back on Earth.  They were a multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-sexual mix of men and women from across the planet. Their laboratory stores of DNA samples from a multitude of flora and fauna could become a new ark to breathe life into a dead planet.
                    The scarcity of heterosexual women on the current duty crew aboard Eden would be regrettable for some, but not insurmountable.  After all, the world's most advanced medical laboratories, including cloning chambers, had been built within this suitable and natural micro-gravity environment.  Mixed families could be bred within a generation for those who so desired; led by a mix of gay, lesbian and straight parents of a new, integrated people.  Together, they could start to rebuild the human race, but this time without the sodomites.
                    As Neilo flew home to Eden, artificial suns had risen on the surface of the Earth below.
                    Genesis.