The End Of The World

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  The girl's face again, but transparent, with a blinding yellow light shining through it. The sitar beat gets faster and faster with the guitar whining behind it and the voice is working itself up into a howling frenzy: “… the last big flash to light my sky…”

  Nothing but the blinding light now—

  “… and zap! the world is done …”

  An utterly black screen for a beat that becomes black fading to blue at a horizon—

  “… but before we die let's dig that high that frees us from our binds … that blows all cool that ego-drool and burns us from our mind … the last big flash, mankind's last gas, the trip we can't take twice …

  Suddenly, the music stops dead for a half a beat. Then: the screen is lit up by an enormous fireball—

  A shattering rumble—

  The fireball coalesces into a mushroom-pillar cloud as the roar goes on. As the roar begins to die out, fire is visible inside the monstrous nuclear cloud. And the girl's face is faintly visible su perimposed over the cloud.

  A soft voice, amplified over the roar, obscenely reverential now: “Brighter … great God, it's brighter … brighter than a thousand suns …”

  And the screen went blank and the lights came on.

  I looked at Jake. Jake looked at me.

  “That's sick,” I said. “That's really sick.”

  “You don't want to run a thing like that, do you, B. D.?” Jake said softly.

  I made some rapid mental calculations. The loathsome thing ran something under five minutes… it could be done …

  “You're right, Jake,” I said. “We won't run a thing like that. We'll cut it out of the tape and squeeze in another commercial at each break. That should cover the time.”

  “You don't understand,” Jake said. “The contract Herm rammed down our throats doesn't allow us to edit. The show's a package—all or nothing. Besides, the whole show's like that.”

  “All like that? What do you mean, all like that?”

  Jake squirmed in his seat. “Those guys are… well, perverts, B. D.,” he said.

  “Perverts?”

  “They're … well, they're in love with the atom bomb or some thing. Every number leads up to the same thing.”

  “You mean … they're all like that?”

  “You got the picture, B. D.,” Jake said. “We run an hour of that or we run nothing at all.”

  “Jesus.”

  I knew what I wanted to say. Burn the tape and write off the million dollars. But I also knew it would cost me my job. And I knew that five minutes after I was out the door, they would have someone in my job who would see things their way. Even my su periors seemed to be just handing down the word from higher up. I had no choice. There was no choice.

  “I'm sorry, Jake,” I said. “We run it.”

  “I resign,” said Jake Pitkin, who had no reputation for courage.

  T minus 10 days … and counting …

  “It's a clear violation of the Test-Ban Treaty,” I said.

  The undersecretary looked as dazed as I felt. “We'll call it a peaceful use of atomic energy, and let the Russians scream,” he said.

  “It's insane.”

  “Perhaps,” the undersecretary said. “But you have your orders, General Carson, and I have mine. From higher up. At exactly 8:58 PM local time on July fourth, you will drop a fifty-kiloton atomic bomb on the designated ground zero at Yucca Flats.”

  “But the people… the television crew …”

  “Will be at least two miles outside the danger zone. Surely, SAC can manage that kind of accuracy under ‘laboratory conditions’.”

  I stiffened. “I do not question the competence of any bomber crew under my command to perform this mission,” I said. “I ques tion the reason for the mission. I question the sanity of the orders.”

  The undersecretary shrugged and smiled weakly. “Welcome to the club.”

  “You mean you don't know what this is all about either?”

  “All I know is what was transmitted to me by the Secretary of Defense, and I got the feeling he doesn't know everything, either. You know that the Pentagon has been screaming for the use of tactical nuclear weapons to end the war in Asia—you SAC boys have been screaming the loudest. Well, several months ago, the president conditionally approved a plan for the use of tactical weap ons during the next monsoon season.”

  I whistled. The civilians were finally coming to their senses. Or were they?

  “But what does that have to do with—?”

  “Public opinion,” the undersecretary said. “It was conditional upon a drastic change in public opinion. At the time the plan was approved, the polls showed that seventy-eight point eight percent of the population opposed the use of tactical nuclear weapons, nine point eight percent favored their use and the rest were undecided or had no opinion. The president agreed to authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons by a date, several months from now, which is still top secret, provided that by that date at least sixty-five percent of the population approved their use and no more than twenty percent actively opposed it.”

  “I see … Just a ploy to keep the Joint Chiefs quiet.”

  “General Carson,” the undersecretary said, “apparently you are out of touch with the national mood. After the first Four Horsemen show, the polls showed that twenty-five percent of the population approved the use of nuclear weapons. After the second show, the figure was forty-one percent. It is now forty-eight percent. Only thirty-two percent are now actively opposed.”

  “You're trying to tell me that a rock group—”

  “A rock group and the cult around it. It's become a national hys teria. There are imitators. Haven't you seen those buttons?”

  “The ones with a mushroom cloud on them that say ‘Do it’?”

  The undersecretary nodded. “Your guess is as good as mine whether the National Security Council just decided that the Horse men hysteria could be used to mold public opinion, or whether the Four Horsemen were their creatures to begin with. But the results are the same either way—the Horsemen and the cult around them have won over precisely that element of the population which was most adamantly opposed to nuclear weapons: hippies, students, dropouts, draft-age youth. Demonstrations against the war and against nuclear weapons have died down. We're pretty close to that sixty-five percent. Someone—perhaps the president himself—has decided that one more big Four Horsemen show will put us over the top.”

  “The president is behind this?”

  “No one else can authorize the detonation of an atomic bomb, after all,” the undersecretary said. “We're letting them do the show live from Yucca Flats. It's being sponsored by an aerospace company heavily dependent on defense contracts. We're letting them truck in a live audience. Of course the government is behind it.”

  “And SAC drops an A-bomb as the show-stopper?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I saw one of those shows,” I said. “My kids were watching it. I got the strangest feeling … I almost wanted that red telephone to ring …”

  “I know what you mean,” the undersecretary said. “Sometimes I get the feeling that whoever's behind this has gotten caught up in the hysteria themselves … that the Horsemen are now using whoever was using them … a closed circle. But I've been tired lately. The war's making us all so tired. If only we could get it all over …”

  “We'd all like to get it over with one way or the other,” I said.

  T minus 60 minutes … and counting …

  I had orders to muster Blackfish’s crew for the live satellite relay of The Four Horsemen's Fourth. Superficially, it might seem strange to order the whole Polaris fleet to watch a television show, but the morale factor involved was quite significant.

  Polaris subs are frustrating duty. Only top sailors are chosen and a good sailor craves action. Yet if we are ever called upon to act, our mission will have been a failure. We spend most of our time honing skills that must never be used. Deterrence is a sound strat egy but a te
rrible drain on the men of the deterrent forces—a drain exacerbated in the past by the negative attitude of our countrymen toward our mission. Men who, in the service of their country, polish their skills to a razor edge and then must refrain from exercising them have a right to resent being treated as pariahs.

  Therefore the positive change in the public attitude toward us that seems to be associated with the Four Horsemen has made them mascots of a kind to the Polaris fleet. In their strange way they seem to speak for us and to us.

  I chose to watch the show in the missile control center, where a full crew must always be ready to launch the missiles on five-minute notice. I have always felt a sense of communion with the duty watch in the missile control center that I cannot share with the other men under my command. Here we are not captain and crew but mind and hand. Should the order come, the will to fire the missiles will be mine and the act will be theirs. At such a moment, it will be good not to feel alone.

  All eyes were on the television set mounted above the main console as the show came on and …

  The screen was filled with a whirling spiral pattern, metallic yellow on metallic blue. There was a droning sound that seemed part sitar and part electronic, and I had the feeling that the sound was somehow coming from inside my head and the spiral seemed etched directly on my retinas. It hurt mildly, yet nothing in the world could have made me turn away.

  Then two voices, chanting against each other:

  “Let it all come in….”

  “Let it all come out….”

  “In … out … in … out … in … out …”

  My head seemed to be pulsing—in-out, in -out, in-out—and the spiral pattern began to pulse color changes with the words: yellow on blue (in) … green on red (out) … In-out-in-out-in-out….

  In the screen … out my head …. I seemed to be beating against some kind of invisible membrane between myself and the screen as if something were trying to embrace my mind and I were fighting it…. But why was I fighting it?

  The pulsing, the chanting, got faster and faster till in could not be told from out and negative spiral afterimages formed in my eyes faster than they could adjust to the changes, piled up on each other faster and faster till it seemed my head would explode—

  The chanting and the droning broke and there were the Four Horsemen, in their robes, playing on some stage against a backdrop of clear blue sky. And a single voice, soothing now: “You are in….”

  Then the view was directly above the Horsemen and I could see that they were on some kind of circular platform. The view moved slowly and smoothly up and away and I saw that the circular stage was atop a tall tower; around the tower and completely circling it was a huge crowd seated on desert sands that stretched away to an empty infinity.

  “And we are in and they are in….”

  I was down among the crowd now; they seemed to melt and flow like plastic, pouring from the television screen to enfold me…. “And we are all in here together….”

  A strange and beautiful feeling … the music got faster and wilder, ecstatic … the hull of the Blackfish seemed unreal … the crowd was swaying to it around me … the distance between myself and the crowd seemed to dissolve … I was there … they were here…. We were transfixed….

  “Oh yeah, we are all in here together … together….”

  T minus 45 minutes … and counting …

  Jeremy and I sat staring at the television screen, ignoring each other and everything around us. Even with the short watches and the short tours of duty, you can get to feeling pretty strange down here in a hole in the ground under tons of concrete; just you and the guy with the other key, with nothing to do but think dark thoughts and get on each other's nerves. We're all supposed to be as stable as men can be, or so they tell us, and they must be right because the world's still here. I mean, it wouldn't take much—just two guys on the same watch over the same three Minutemen flipping out at the same time, turning their keys in the dual lock, pressing the three buttons … Pow! World War III!

  A bad thought, the kind we're not supposed to think or I'll start watching Jeremy and he'll start watching me and we'll get a par anoid feedback going…. But that can't happen; we're too stable, too responsible. As long as we remember that it's healthy to feel a little spooky down here, we'll be all right.

  But the television set is a good idea. It keeps us in contact with the outside world, keeps it real. It'd be too easy to start thinking that the missile control center down here is the only real world and that nothing that happens up there really matters…. Bad thought!

  The Four Horsemen … somehow these guys help you get it all out. I mean that feeling that it might be better to release all that tension, get it all over with. Watching the Four Horsemen, you're able to go with it without doing any harm, let it wash over you and then through you. I suppose they are crazy; they're all the human craziness in ourselves that we've got to keep very careful watch over down here. Letting it all come out watching the Horsemen makes it surer that none of it will come out down. I guess that's why a lot of us have taken to wearing those “Do it” buttons off duty. The brass doesn't mind; they seem to understand that it's the kind of inside sick joke we need to keep us functioning.

  Now that spiral thing they had started the show with—and the droning—came back on. Zap! I was right back in the screen again, as if the commercial hadn't happened.

  “We are all in here together….”

  And then a close-up of the lead singer, looking straight at me, as close as Jeremy and somehow more real. A mean-looking guy with something behind his eyes that told me he knew where everything lousy and rotten was at.

  A bass began to thrum behind him and some kind of electronic hum that set my teeth on edge. He began playing his guitar, mean and low-down. And singing in that kind of drop-dead tone of voice that starts brawls in bars:

  “I stabbed my mother and I mugged my paw….”

  A riff of heavy guitar chords echoed the words mockingly as a huge swastika (red on black, black on red) pulsed like a naked vein on the screen—

  The face of the Horsemen, leering—

  “Nailed my sister to the toilet door….”

  Guitar behind the pulsing swastika—

  “Drowned a puppy in a ce-ment machine…. Burned a kitten just to hear it scream….”

  On the screen, just a big fire burning in slow-motion, and the voice became a slow, shrill, agonized wail:

  “Oh God, I've got this red-hot fire burning in the marrow of my brain….

  “Oh yes, I got this fire burning … in the stinking marrow of my brain….

  “Gotta get me a blowtorch … and set some naked flesh on flame….”

  The fire dissolved into the face of a screaming Asian woman, who ran through a burning village clawing at the napalm on her back.

  “I got this message … boiling in the bubbles of my blood…. A man ain'tnothing but a fire burning … in a dirty glob of mud….” A film-clip of a Nuremburg rally: a revolving swastika of marching men waving torches—

  Then the leader of the Horsemen superimposed over the twisted flaming cross:

  “Don't you hate me, baby, can't you feel somethin’ screaming in your mind?”

  “Don't you hate me, baby, feel me drowning you in slime!”

  Just the face of the Horsemen howling hate—

  “Oh yes, I'm a monster, Mother….”

  A long view of the crowd around the platform, on their feet, waving arms, screaming soundlessly. Then a quick zoom in and a kaleidoscope of faces, eyes feverish, mouths open and howling—

  “Just call me—”

  The face of the Horseman superimposed over the crazed faces of the crowd—

  “Mankind!”

  I looked at Jeremy. He was toying with the key on the chain around his neck. He was sweating. I suddenly realized that I was sweating too and that my own key was throbbing in my hand alive….

  T minus 13 minutes … and counting …

&nbs
p; A funny feeling, the captain watching the Four Horsemen here in the Blackfish’s missile control center with us. Sitting in front of my console watching the television set with the captain kind of breathing down my neck…. I got the feeling he knew what was going through me and I couldn't know what was going through him … and it gave the fire inside me a kind of greasy feel I didn't like….

  Then the commercial was over and that spiral-thing came on again and whoosh! It sucked me right back into the television set and I stopped worrying about the captain or anything like that….

  Just the spiral going yellow-blue, red-green, and then starting to whirl and whirl, faster and faster, changing colors and whirling, whirling, whirling…. And the sound of a kind of Coney Island carousel tinkling behind it, faster and faster and faster, whirling and whirling and whirling, flashing red-green, yellow-blue, and whirl ing, whirling, whirling….

  And this big hum filling my body and whirling, whirling, whirling. … My muscles relaxing, going limp, whirling, whirling, whirl ing, all limp, whirling, whirling, whirling, oh so nice, just whirling, whirling….

  And in the center of the flashing spiraling colors, a bright dot of colorless light, right at the center, not moving, not changing, while the whole world went whirling and whirling in colors around it, and the humming was coming from the spinning colors and the dot was humming its song to me….

  The dot was a light way down at the end of a long, whirling, whirling tunnel. The humming started to get a little louder. The bright dot started to get a little bigger. I was drifting down the tunnel toward it, whirling, whirling, whirling….

  T minus 11 minutes … and counting …

  Whirling, whirling, whirling down a long, long tunnel of pulsing colors, whirling, whirling, toward the circle of light way down at the end of the tunnel…. How nice it would be to finally get there and soak up the beautiful hum filling my body and then I could forget that I was down here in this hole in the ground with a hard brass key in my hand, just Duke and me, down here in a cave under the ground that was a spiral of flashing colors, whirling, whirling toward the friendly light at the end of the tunnel, whirling, whirling….