by James Morrow
‘What happened to those ensigns?’ George asked. He stepped forward, scissoring his legs so as to hide his soggy crotch.
‘They had to go off watch, George,’ said his rescuer amiably. ‘I believe they just wanted to scare you.’
‘Whatever made them think that threatening to launch me into the ocean would scare me?’ The tomb inscriber laughed. His rescuer did not. George had never before met such a clean-shaven individual. It was as if all the man’s whisker follicles had been cauterized.
‘My grandfather was in the Navy,’ said the rescuer. His voice was like gourmet coffee, silky, layered. ‘Evidently it’s changed a lot since those days. These sailors have not received the Holy Spirit.’
George looked at his knuckles. They were speckled with a substance resembling tar. ‘Their blood is black.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said the rescuer.
‘You in the Navy, too?’
‘Ever watch Christian television?’
‘Not a great deal.’
‘Last year Countdown to God’s Wrath – you’ve never caught it? – we had a consistently better rating than Gospel Sing-Along. We get two and a half tons of mail a week. The Lord is doing so many wonderful things.’
‘My wife always wanted to be on television.’
The evangelist extended a soft, pliant hand. ‘Reverend Peter Sparrow,’ he said. Taking Sparrow’s hand, George felt sustenance and comfort radiate from each finger. This was a very fine evacuee indeed.
‘Television is becoming God’s chosen medium these days, just the way Gutenberg’s press used to be,’ said the evangelist. ‘We’ve been running a lot of old movies on Countdown lately, to build up our audience, follow what I’m saying? You’ve got to start where people are at. Sure, maybe Ben-Hur isn’t such a great picture – I mean, leprosy doesn’t really look like that, it’s quite a bit worse – but then you can move them toward the better stuff, The Robe and Quo Vadis and so on.’
George coughed. The torpedo tube had probably contained several infectious diseases. ‘So we’re all going to Antarctica.’
‘Isn’t it wonderful how nuclear exchanges cannot touch Christians?’ said Sparrow. ‘I knew the Perfect Exile would be a time of joy, but I hadn’t realized how rapturous the joy would be. I’m about to see my family.’
‘They’re in Antarctica?’
‘They’re in the sky with Jesus.’
George glanced up.
‘May I ask you something?’ The evangelist touched George’s spotted knuckles. ‘Are you saved?’
‘Yes, you just saved me. I’m most grateful to you. If your program was still on, I’d watch it.’
‘I’m talking about your relationship with—’
‘My family died when the Russians blew up Wildgrove. Or so I’m told.’
Reverend Sparrow frowned. ‘The Hebrew prophets – Ezekiel, Jeremiah – they’re all batting a thousand, understand? The Perfect Exile, the Terrible Trial, the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem – they saw everything, right? You’re saved, George, or you wouldn’t be on this trip.’
‘I’m a Unitarian.’
‘I’m going to pray for you,’ said Reverend Sparrow firmly.
‘I appreciate it,’ said George, and he did.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In Which Our Hero Makes a Strategic Decision and Acquires a Reason Not to Curse God and Die
In the days that followed, George’s grief took on a New England quality, becoming not so much an emotion as a job to do.
He tried to remember all those times when fatherhood had seemed a crushing burden. Moments when Holly’s screeching or stubbornness had brought him to the brink of child beating, moments when he felt as if his life had been stolen and replaced by a talkative iron ball chained to his ankle. But only cloying memories came. Holly putting her dollies to bed. Trying to feed the sick cat before it died. Singing to herself. Struggling to grasp the point of a knock-knock joke. She had never understood that proper knock-knock jokes are puns. Knock-knock, she would say. Who’s there? a four-year-old friend would ask. Jennifer (or Suzy or Jeremiah or Alfred or Margaret), Holly would reply.
Jennifer who?
Jennifer Poopie Diapers Stupid Dumb Face!
And then she and her friend would dissolve in giggles, overwhelmed by preschool social satire.
Knock-knock.
‘Who’s there?’ George didn’t really need to ask. The knock was as characteristic as a fingerprint. ‘It’s open, Brat.’
The MARCH Hare pushed boisterously into the cabin – a one-man infantry charge. Accompanying him was a fiftyish man with a dark razoring stare and a marionette’s gangly frame.
‘Meet Dr William Randstable,’ said Brat. ‘The whiz kid of Sugar Brook Lab and, it is rumored, a certifiable genius.’ The general had lost some weight, and the bags under his eyes looked like change purses. ‘William, this is George Paxton – the poet laureate of Wildgrove, Massachusetts.’
‘I’m not really a whiz kid any more,’ said Randstable. His suit was several sizes too large. ‘More of a whiz middle-aged man.’
‘I hear you once beat the Russian chess champion,’ said George.
‘I made the next-to-the-last mistake,’ said Randstable modestly.
Brat patted his man-portable thermonuclear device. ‘Well, men, looks as if some more fat is about to enter the fire.’ His words fought past a trembling throat and clenched teeth. ‘They’re planning to knock over the remaining enemy missile fields at fourteen hundred hours. If we hurry to the launch control room, we can catch thirty-six Multiprongs go galloping off like Grant took Richmond.’
‘Sugar Brook did the technical support for Multiprong guidance and control,’ said Randstable with a quick chuckle. He removed his horn-rimmed eyeglasses and began chewing on the ear piece. ‘I always wondered how I’d feel on the day they actually left the nest.’
‘Pretty upset, I guess,’ said George. An understatement, he concluded from what came out of Randstable’s chest, a conglomeration of sighs and uncontrolled wheezing.
After moving down a narrow passageway crowded with pipes, ducts, ladders, and stopcocks, the three evacuees came upon a hatch labeled RECREATION AREA: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Brat decided they were authorized personnel. Crossing over, they entered a throbbing undersea metropolis, each facility scaled to the constraints of submarine space. They started along a corridor named Entertainment Lane. George noted a compact skating rink, a slightly abbreviated bowling alley, a miniature golf course where every hazard entailed placing the ball in one orifice or other of a plaster mermaid, and a pair of succinct indoor swimming pools. The enlisted men’s pool was eight feet deep, the officers’ ten. A waking nightmare seized George – Peach and Cobb wrapping his body in chains and throwing him into the officers’ pool. Or perhaps they would favor the bowling alley. They would tie him up and leave him behind the pins.
A movie marquee blazed outside a small theater. SERGEI BONDARCHUK’S ‘WAR AND PEACE,’ the marquee shouted. Several blue-suited sailors were lined up at the box office; Peach and Cobb were not among them. Opposite the theater, the little Silver Dollar Casino dazzled George with its hurlyburly of lights and its promises of instant fortune. Through the swinging doors he noticed a seaman second-class dealing blackjack. The clacks and gongs of slot machines ricocheted into the corridor.
Passing through a bulkhead labeled DETERRENCE AREA: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, the evacuees found themselves before an open doorway to the missile compartment. Enlisted men streamed back and forth. Brat accosted the first officer he could find, a freckle-faced lieutenant named Grass.
‘Mister Grass, I thought you were due to launch at fourteen hundred hours.’
The young officer neglected to return Brat’s salute. ‘The reentry vehicles aren’t ready,’ he said.
‘Not ready? What kind of operation are you running here, Mister? Sverre will have your pips on a plate.’
Now Grass did salute. He used the wrong hand. Marching up to Ge
orge, he presented a conspiratorial wink. ‘Aren’t you the one they tried to blow into the water last week? Pretty funny.’
They followed Grass into the cavernous, echo-laden room.
‘I nearly suffocated,’ said George.
‘I believe that was the point,’ said Grass.
Overbearing in their size, dazzling in their metallic sheen, the thirty-six launch tubes rose toward the ceiling like rows of ancient Egyptian pillars. Indeed, the missile compartment suggested nothing so much as a technological incarnation of the Temple of Karnak. George advanced at a stoop, cowed by the overbearing majesty of national security. There were worshipers in the temple. Perched on scaffolding, sailors swarmed up and down the tubes, unbolting the access plates and lowering them to the deck via steel cables.
‘Why are they opening the tubes, Mister?’ Brat demanded.
‘To get at the nosecone shrouds,’ Grass replied.
‘Why get at the shrouds?’
‘To reach the bombs.’
‘Why?’
‘To uncover the arming systems.’
‘Why?’
‘To smash them to pieces.’
Brat stuck a finger in his ear and swizzled it around. ‘Excuse me, Mister, but the EMP from that Omaha explosion must have shorted out my hearing. Sounds like you’re defusing the warheads.’
‘Those things are dangerous, General. If one detonates during launch, somebody could get hurt.’
A cluster of bomb-carrying reentry vehicles was visible at the top of the nearest tube. Each vehicle looked like a witch’s hat: black, conical, smeared with strange oils.
‘You’re shooting off unarmed missiles?’ said Randstable, eyebrows arching with curiosity. ‘Some part of your strategy is eluding me, Lieutenant.’
‘As you no doubt know, Dr Randstable, on a submarine every cubic inch carries a premium.’ Grass smiled boyishly. ‘Once I clear out all these boosters and payloads, I’ll be free to use the tubes for cultivating orange trees.’ He winked. ‘Project Citrus.’
‘Orange trees!’ Brat’s voice echoed through the great glimmering temple. ‘Orange trees, my left nut!’
The sailors stopped working. They stared down from on high.
‘As you might imagine, General, fresh oranges are difficult to come by at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,’ said Grass. ‘If you ask me, fruit tree conversion is the wave of the future.’
The sailors went back to their disarmament duties, busy as ants on a Popsicle.
Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre had an apocalypse collection. His hobby was the end of the world. When not stunned by gin or engaged in naval activities, he would ransack the ship’s library for a new vision of doomsday, and, finding one, write a bad epic poem about it. Fire, ice, famine, flood, drought, pollution, war – Sverre had collected them all. In his Noah and Naamah the captain had written of the forty-day flood in which earth’s sinners drowned, of Noah sending out a white raven to seek dry land, of the snowy bird finding instead a floating corpse and feasting on it, since which time all its feathers have been black. For Yima Victorious Sverre had written of a fierce endless winter, of Yima receiving instructions from the Zoroastrian God of Light, of the great enclosure into which the hero brought the seeds of men and animals. No humpbacks’ seeds, the God of Light, an early eugenicist, had counseled Yima. No impotents, lunatics, lepers, or jealous lovers.
Sverre sat down at his writing desk and, after thrusting his quill pen into a skull-shaped ink pot, attacked the paper with bold flourishes. Noah’s raven peered at him – an alabaster knickknack, white as a scopas suit. The captain wrote of the sea monster Jormungandr, hidden in the icy depths, a serpent so long it girded the mortal world, Midgard. The Norse god Thor had once hunted the Midgard serpent using a chain baited with the head of an ox. Jormungandr bit. Thor hauled the serpent from the sea, raised his hammer for the deathblow. The chain snapped. But Thor and the serpent were destined to meet again, at Ragnarok, World’s End, and this time—
A pounding halted Sverre’s progress of the Saga of Thor. He inserted his pen in the raven’s mouth, swallowed some gin, staggered across his cabin.
‘These evacuees insisted on seeing you,’ grunted Lieutenant Grass as Sverre yanked open the door.
Brat offered a hostile salute. ‘Captain Sverre, an activity that could seriously erode our security – evidently it goes by the code name Citrus – is presently under way in your missile compartment.’
‘You may leave, Mister Grass,’ said the captain in a foreign accent that refused to declare itself.
Certain that nothing good was about to transpire between Brat and Sverre, George attempted to absent himself by surveying the captain’s elegantly anachronistic cabin – dark wood walls, plush carpets, puffy sofas, antique globe. Perched on the writing desk was an alabaster raven that Holly would have liked.
‘I see you fancy my pet, Mr Paxton,’ said Sverre. ‘His name is Edgar Allan Poe.’
‘Somebody once asked me a riddle,’ said George. ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’
‘I’ve heard that one,’ said Sverre. ‘It has no answer.’
‘I’ll go to work on it,’ said Randstable, happily perplexed.
‘You’ll be wasting your time,’ said Sverre. ‘Now here’s one that does have an answer – when is a first strike not a first strike?’
‘When?’ asked Randstable.
‘When it is an anticipatory retaliation,’ said Sverre.
‘Hmm . . .’ said Randstable, sucking on his eyeglasses frames. ‘Right. Good.’
Brat’s face had acquired the color and proportions of a ripe tomato. ‘I am told that this Project Citrus carries your authorization, sir,’ he hissed, rapping loudly on the launching pad of his man-portable thermonuclear device, ‘and I wish to register the strongest possible objection!’
A smile stole out from Sverre’s black beard. ‘Those Multiprongs just slow us down, and the sooner Grass replaces them with a hydroponic orchard, the better.’ His eyes were glittery black discs. His nose, a noble pyramid, threw a quarter of his countenance into shadow. ‘What’s the matter, General, don’t you like oranges? The fact is, this war doesn’t interest me much any more, and neither does the United States Navy. Anyone want a drink? We serve gin around here.’
Brat twisted his mouth into the quintessence of contempt. ‘I know your breed, Sverre. You’re one of those renegades, aren’t you? You’ve got your emergency-action message, you’re supposed to take out some targets, and now you’re getting all philosophical or something.’
The captain set out four Styrofoam cups on his writing desk and procured a grungy bottle from his claw-hammer coat. ‘The Brazilian Indians foresaw all this,’ he slurred as he poured. ‘They believed the earth was suspended over a fire, like a chicken on a spit.’ He served the gin, then gestured his three guests onto a sofa with scrolled arms and a rosette that put George in mind of tombstone Design No. 8591. As Brat seethed, Sverre wandered back to his desk and took down a slide projector. ‘Before you start leading a mutiny, General’ – the oak paneling on a bulkhead parted to reveal a screen – ‘I want you to see some damage assessments.’
Flicking a switch, Sverre brought utter darkness to a room that had never seen the sun. He turned on the projector, and a bright wedge of light shot forward, hitting the screen. No specks hovered in the beam; the City of New York was a world without dust. Sverre stood before the rectangle of light, his silhouette gesturing broadly. ‘The transmissions we monitored from the National Command Authority suggest that the Soviet Union started the war. The first evidence reached NORAD via airborne look-down radar. A flurry of Russian Spitball cruise missiles was flying over Canada on a trajectory for Washington. Grounds for preemption, the Joint Chiefs argued. And so a surgical counterforce strike was launched against a few selected Soviet ICBM fields and bomber bases. And so the enemy . . . shot back.’
The captain went to his desk and, swallowing a mouthful of gin, dropped the first slide into place. ‘
These pictures were taken through Periscope Number One’s geosynchronous satellite array.’
‘We worked on that rig,’ said Randstable.
‘Like any global conflict,’ said Sverre, ‘World War Three included many exciting and memorable battles.’ A blur lit the screen. Sverre twisted the projector lens, and a charred crevasse appeared. ‘The Battle of Joplin, Missouri,’ he narrated. He changed slides. A burning field, automobiles lying on their roofs like flipped turtles. ‘The Battle of Dearborn, Michigan,’ said Sverre. New slide. A prairie covered with dark scars. ‘The Battle of Dodge City, Kansas,’ the captain explained. New slide. A stand of blistered trees rising from a swamp. ‘The Battle of Winter Haven, Florida.’ New slide. An ocean of ashes. ‘The Battle of Twin Falls, Idaho.’
Now the images came in rapid fire. Racine: Amarillo. Hagerstown. Bowling Green. Chattanooga. Bangor. Within half an hour Sverre had spun through four circular trays, each holding a hundred and twenty slides.
He shut off the bulb, and the fall of Troy, New York, dissolved into nothingness. The evacuees sat in the thick darkness, drinking. Randstable made a sound like a dog having a nightmare. Brat alternated snorts with coughs. For five minutes not a word was spoken.
‘Just how reliable are these damage assessments?’ an invisible Brat said at last.
‘No doubt there are pockets of survivors,’ said Sverre, ‘and I’m fairly confident that ten or fifteen towns were overlooked.’ The lights came on. ‘But on the whole the post-exchange environment is accurately reflected here.’
‘Yeah? Well, that’s absurd,’ said Brat. ‘The MARCH Plan was chock full of escalation controls.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Randstable. ‘Oh, God. Oh, dear.’ The former whiz kid pulled a small magnetic chess set from his jacket. ‘Quick! Does anybody know a good chess problem? Give me a problem, please, somebody!’
Sverre said, ‘Put eight queens on the board in such a way that none can take another.’