This Is the Way the World Ends (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by James Morrow

  ‘I resigned. I announced that I could no longer be part of an administration that slept with genocidal weapons.’

  George was impressed by the way Reverend Sparrow managed to confine his fury within a broad, loving smile.

  ‘I imagine the Soviets were sorry to see you out of power,’ said Bonenfant. ‘No further questions.’

  ‘We used to run into her type around Washington,’ said Wengernook. ‘Always yelling for peace, as if we were at war. You can’t be logical with nuns.’

  ‘She’s a priest,’ said Randstable.

  ‘Jefferson’s becoming fed up, don’t you think?’ said Wengernook.

  ‘The whole damn bench is becoming fed up,’ said Brat.

  George breathed an elaborate sigh of relief. As a Unitarian, he had always found Catholics frightening and vaguely extraterrestrial, all that blood squirting from Jesus’ palms. It could have been much worse.

  The following morning a deputy prosecutor told the tribunal that his team would now be introducing a ‘new category of evidence.’ They wanted the judges to see ‘models of the very instruments through which the defendants had committed the extinction.’

  ‘The court cautions you to keep things moving,’ said Justice Gioberti. ‘We haven’t the luxury of a flexible calendar.’

  ‘Nothing to worry about, your Honors,’ replied the deputy prosecutor, a tubby man whose stomach kept billowing out of splits in his scopas suit. ‘We have taken steps to guarantee that the presentation will be swift, lucid, and even, if I may be so bold’ – he blew on a tin whistle – ‘entertaining.’

  A quick drum roll drew George’s attention to the press box, where the reporters had been evicted in favor of a dance band. The cymbal sounded, the trumpets answered with a salacious fanfare, and then all the musicians launched into an uptempo rendition of ‘Swanee River.’ A line of attractive female associate prosecutors wearing top hats and spangled scopas suits began parading through the courtroom, each carrying an item from America’s pre-war deterrent. Rapidly an ice arsenal accumulated before the bench, dozens of intricately carved replicas. Little frozen missiles piled up, labeled with cardboard tags. Short-range, medium-range, intercontinental. Air-launched, ground-launched, sea-launched. ‘Such as Gloria’s security, Exhibit G here, a solid propellant, mediumrange missile intended for the European theater,’ said the deputy prosecutor. ‘Exhibit H, currently defending our friend Kimberly, represents America’s force of Tomahawk sea-to-surface cruise missiles armed with two-hundred-and-fifty-kiloton . . .’

  Warheads appeared. Low-yield, high-yield, enhanced-radiation. ‘Exhibit M being an MK-12 reentry vehicle from the Guardian Angel II ICBM. And now the court will please observe Dolores and her Exhibit N, one of the Navy’s twenty-kiloton nuclear . . .’

  Sea mines were paraded through the courtroom. Nuclear land mines, nuclear torpedos, nuclear free-fall bombs.

  After lunch the prosecution unveiled a new branch of the ice arsenal, nuclear-capable and nuclear-armed aircraft. ‘Including Shirley’s deterrent, Exhibit T, a Macho Mike helicopter equipped with two nuclear depth charges. We now present the category of nuclear-capable and . . .’

  Nuclear-armed ships arrived. Carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines. ‘Such as SSBN 688 Lyndon Johnson, a high-speed attack submarine armed with Harpoon missiles. Our final weapon, your Honors, Exhibit W, is being fielded by young Wendy. You will observe that it is not made of ice.’

  As the band played ‘Camptown Races,’ Wendy carried Brat’s man-portable thermonuclear device to the bench and set it before Justice Yoshinobu.

  ‘This isn’t likely to explode or anything, is it?’ asked the judge, hefting the weapon.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the deputy prosecutor. ‘The firing procedure involves a twelve-digit code and a little brass key. As we all know from personal experience, your Honors, nuclear weapons are one of the safest technologies ever invented.’

  ‘Place looks like a goddamn toy store,’ said Wengernook.

  ‘They’re pissed by all this clutter, you can tell,’ said Brat.

  ‘Really pissed,’ said George. ‘Toy store,’ he added, fighting tears.

  At the end of the second week the prosecution called a silver-haired and aristocratic gentleman named Victor Seabird. He was handsome in the way that only advancing age can be, the hand-someness of a deep-rooted tree or an antique clock.

  ‘Mr Seabird, according to your recollections would you have been the principal American negotiator of the so-called Einstein Treaties?’ Aquinas asked.

  ‘That is correct,’ said the witness.

  Waves of well-being surged through George, as if he were in the presence of Nadine Covington.

  ‘At the time of the holocaust,’ said Aquinas, ‘nuclear weapons control was the exclusive province of STABLE, the Strategic, Tactical, and Anti-Ballistic Limitation and Equalization talks engineered by the defendant Overwhite. Would the Einstein process have continued his initiatives?’

  ‘We broke completely with the STABLE approach,’ answered Seabird. ‘It was for shit,’ he added brightly.

  ‘That’s his opinion,’ muttered Overwhite.

  ‘Einstein I outlawed anti-satellite technologies,’ said Seabird. ‘Einstein II was a comprehensive test ban. Einstein III extended the 1968 nonproliferation treaty. Einstein IV was a moratorium on warhead assembly and land-based missile deployment. Einstein V halted production of weapons-grade material. Einstein VI mandated the destruction of all nuclear stockpiles. Our basic goal, you see, was to—’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ interrupted Justice Gioberti. ‘Are you saying you would have abolished nuclear weapons?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Seabird.

  The four judges leaned forward in spontaneous but perfect synchronization.

  ‘That must have been a hard treaty to negotiate,’ said Justice Wojciechowski.

  ‘A bear,’ said Seabird.

  ‘Did it help when you got that funding increase?’ asked Aquinas.

  ‘The budget of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has traditionally been one ten-thousandth the size of the Defense Department’s,’ said Seabird. ‘When we went into Einstein VI, however, we were nearly as big as the Post Office.’

  ‘Some of us on the bench are surprised that the Soviets signed Einstein VI,’ said Justice Wojciechowski.

  ‘Their motives, I believe, were economic. Totalitarian socialism is a foolish enough way to run a country without throwing in an arms race.’

  For the next four hours Seabird outlined the details of the abolition regime. Nations included . . . technologies banned . . . timetables . . . verification . . .

  ‘Verification,’ said Aquinas. ‘I imagine that took several barrels of midnight oil to work out.’

  ‘God, yes. Don’t remind me.’ When Seabird smiled, another well-being wave hit George. ‘Of course, with an abolition regime, verification is easier than with a more limited agreement, in that a single sighting of a banned weapon is sufficient to prove a violation.’

  ‘Still, no verification system is perfect,’ said Justice Gioberti.

  ‘That’s where the space forts came in,’ said Seabird. ‘Orbiting platforms armed with charged-particle beams that could kill enemy missiles during the boost phase. Einstein VI encouraged the nuclear powers to pursue this technology, along with unarmed interceptor-rockets and ground-based laser defenses.’

  ‘America would have taken the lead here, as I recall,’ said Aquinas.

  ‘When the Soviet space forts proved unreliable, we saw no alternative but to ship them a few of our prototypes.’

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ said Justice Gioberti. ‘You gave this technology to the Soviets?’

  ‘As you might imagine, your Honors, it’s frightfully de-stabilizing for only one nuclear power to be building effective ballistic missile defenses.’

  ‘Do space forts render civilian populations invulnerable?’ Aquinas asked.

  ‘In an all-out attack, many cities would still have
been lost. The forts were essentially a hedge against cheating.’

  ‘So space-based defenses make little sense in the absence of disarmament?’

  ‘Without Einstein VI, it’s a fair guess – I’m certain of it really, when I look at history – a fair guess that the space forts would have carried the traditional arms race into whole new realms of psychosis.’ Seabird indicated the frozen missiles piled up before the bench. ‘The nuclear powers would have sought to overwhelm each other’s forts with huge offensive deployments.’

  ‘Were there any other hedges against cheating?’

  ‘The treaty allowed its signers to build fallout shelters to a fare-thee-well, and even to adopt those weird crisis relocation schemes – you know, where they take everybody out into the country? It also permitted extensive modernization of conventional forces in Europe. After all, this was the real world we were talking about.’

  George wondered exactly how Bonenfant was going to rip apart Einstein VI. Why would Bonenfant want to rip apart Einstein VI? asked his spermatids. To help our case, he replied.

  ‘It must have been a great day when this agreement went into effect,’ said Aquinas.

  ‘Two intermediate-range missiles kicked off the regime,’ said Seabird. ‘The UN brought them here to Antarctica. I watched the whole thing on television. My family and me, my grandchildren. I’ll never forget. Who could forget? High noon, Greenwich Mean Time. Ross Island, Antarctica. The ceremony began with a team of scientists removing the fissionable material from the warheads and turning it over to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which later diluted it with uranium-238 and burned it up in a Brazilian nuclear power plant.’

  ‘So the missiles were now disarmed . . .’

  ‘An American MacArthur III and a Soviet SS-90. The Army Corps of Engineers carried them to the top of the Mount Erebus volcano and suspended them on chains. And then all these teenagers, about a dozen high-school students from different countries, they started cranking the windlass and lowering the missiles into the crater. First the one with the American flag on its side – the kids melted it. Then the one with the hammer and sickle—’

  As when a shower rushes on an unsuspecting picnic, Victor Seabird began suddenly to cry. His sobs echoed off the slick white walls of the Ice Palace. Aquinas comforted the negotiator with an unembarrassed hand on his shoulder.

  ‘These are painful memories,’ said the prosecutor.

  ‘A few minutes later the celebrations started.’ Seabird removed tears from his cheeks with little flicks of his index finger. ‘It was like . . . I don’t know. Like when your team wins the World Series on a ninth-inning homer or something.’ The witness’s voice became a rasp as he described how people celebrated Einstein VI – how they honked their car horns, blew factory whistles, drank toasts, closed schools, took the afternoon off, observed moments of silence, threw parties, went to church, smiled at strangers . . . ‘Stevie went marching around the house. He was three. He had this little American flag. “Granddaddy got rid of the bombs!” he kept shouting. “Granddaddy got—” ’ Despair jammed the negotiator’s throat.

  The silence was long and thick. George’s bullet wound throbbed. All he could imagine was Holly marching through Victor Seabird’s house, waving the Stars and Stripes. He saw her doing a silly dance with Stevie.

  We’re sunk, aren’t we? his spermatids asked. Not if a vulture expert shows up, he replied.

  Slowly, grandly, Aquinas said, ‘No further questions.’

  And then it came. The applause. It shook the gallery and laid siege to the glass booth. Overwhite pushed his gloved hands against his ears. When the tumult finally subsided, Justice Jefferson invited Bonenfant to cross-examine.

  ‘There are all kinds of problems with that abolition proposal,’ said Overwhite, lowering his hands.

  ‘If Bonenfant is any good, he’ll eat it for breakfast,’ said Wengernook.

  ‘Remember when they tried to get rid of booze in the twenties?’ said Brat. ‘A disaster.’

  George admitted to his spermatids that he was very confused.

  ‘Mr Seabird,’ said Bonenfant, closing for combat, ‘I fail to see any ultimate merit in your Einstein VI treaty. Like all such utopian schemes, it depended on trusting a country that had lied about its missile installations in Cuba, had shot down a defenseless Korean airliner . . . the list is endless.’

  ‘Well, the pre-abolition world entailed quite a bit of trust, too, don’t you think?’ said Seabird. ‘Every day, those defendants over there trusted the Soviets not to try a preemptive strike. They trusted them to construct failsafe launch-control devices . . . Utopian? Well, I wouldn’t call it that, not when you consider all the renegotiating we did. We had a Standing Consultative Commission on Einstein VI Violations, and I don’t think a week went by without a squawk from one side or the other.’

  ‘So you admit that the whole thing would have eventually broken down?’

  ‘We believed that the worst possible situation was the one that had existed – fifty thousand bombs held in check by terror and luck. Vice President Mother Mary Catherine had convinced us that nuclear arsenals were the great evil of the twentieth century, just as slavery had been the great evil of the nineteenth century. The weapons had to be banished.’

  ‘Sheer fantasy. People would always know how to create nuclear arms.’

  ‘People would always know how to create slaves, too.’

  ‘Russia was a huge country. What if the Soviets had squirreled away a few hundred bombs before Einstein VI was signed? Suppose they secretly developed a delivery system capable of penetrating your space forts? They could have demolished America with a bolt from the blue.’

  ‘Yes, but they would have assumed appalling risks.’

  ‘I don’t see any risks.’

  ‘Under Einstein VI, deterrence remained in effect.’

  Bonenfant made a great show of stifling a grin. ‘Deterrence? Without weapons?’

  Deterrence? thought George. Without weapons?

  ‘Yes. That’s what we called it, in fact. Weaponless deterrence.’

  ‘Now we’ve really gone through the looking glass.’

  ‘It’s like this. One day we said, “Isn’t there a significant difference between a nation that has never been a nuclear power and a nation that was once a nuclear power and is now disarmed?” And we answered, “Yes, there is. The second nation still has a deterrent. The deterrent is the capacity to rearm.” ’

  Deep ruts appeared in Justice Jefferson’s brow. ‘That sounds like a pretty flimsy deterrent to us, Mr Seabird.’

  ‘Not really a deterrent at all,’ said Justice Yoshinobu.

  The witness raised his hands in a braking gesture. ‘Under Einstein VI every side maintained hardened, well-defended factories for the purpose of building new arsenals should an adversary be caught cheating. If I remember right, a typical lead time was four weeks to the production of eighty warheads plus cruise missiles to deliver them.’

  In the tone of a teenager dealing with a naive little brother, Bonenfant said, ‘So the Soviets wipe out your cities and then sit around drinking vodka for four weeks, waiting for you to rearm and fight back?’

  ‘With weaponless deterrence, the Soviets do not attack in the first place. Given the space forts, the civil defense programs, the possibility of reciprocal cheating, the limited size of Russia’s clandestine arsenal, and America’s latent potential to retaliate, there are too many uncertainties.’

  ‘Sounds like the same old stalemate,’ said Justice Wojciechowski.

  ‘This was a new kind of stalemate. It had the advantage of not occurring on the edge of an infinite abyss.’

  ‘Your regime was really just a method of buying time, wasn’t it?’ asked Justice Jefferson.

  ‘Time,’ echoed Seabird softly. ‘Good old time,’ he muttered.

  ‘Rather like the policies of my clients,’ said Bonenfant smoothly. ‘No further questions.’

  Justice Jefferson removed her whalebone glas
ses and stared into blurry space. Her eyes darted rapidly, powered by agitated thoughts.

  ‘Is that abolition stuff really true?’ asked George.

  ‘It’s a load of camel dung,’ answered Brat.

  ‘He’s making it all up,’ asserted Wengernook.

  ‘The Scriptures say nothing about it,’ noted Sparrow.

  ‘If they’d given me the goddamn Post Office’s budget,’ said Overwhite, ‘I might have brought off a few miracles too.’

  AQUINAS TO CALL FINAL WITNESS TOMORROW, Mount Christ-church proclaimed.

  Hearing his name, Jared Seldin, a small, thin boy with hair suggesting some futuristic strain of wheat, wandered into the courtroom. When he grasped the Bible to be sworn in, its weight nearly knocked him flat. The witness’s face was as dark and vibrant as polished oak. He gave his age as eight.

  Eight, thought George. Too old to believe in Santa Claus, old enough to ride a two-wheeler.

  Aquinas approached the stand cautiously, as if trying to get a better view of a fawn. ‘What century would you have been born in, Jared?’

  ‘Let’s see, 2134 . . . that’s the twenty-second century.’

  ‘And where would you have lived?’

  ‘Habitat-Seven.’

  ‘Is that a country?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A country.’

  ‘What’s a country?’ asked the boy.

  ‘Hard to explain . . . Now, how would you describe Habitat-Seven?’

  ‘Kind of an asteroid, I guess, all hollow inside, with a ramjet. It could go at speeds close to light, ’cause we had this big funnel in front that scooped up hydrogen atoms and sent them into this fusion engine, and then the atoms go whoosh out the back. We had plans to visit a star.’

  ‘What star?’

  ‘I forget. It had a planet.’

  ‘Did you like Habitat-Seven, as far as you can remember?’

  ‘It was a lot nicer than Antarctica.’

  ‘Yes, Jared, it must have been.’

  ‘I would have had a puppy. His name would have been Ralph. Why does everything have to be so sad, Mr Aquinas?’

  ‘I don’t know. Tell me, Jared, did the people in Habitat-Seven ever get into a war?’