This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

  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 George, 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 Georg
e 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.”

  “Not enough queens,” wheezed Randstable. “Doesn’t matter. I’ve solved it already.”

  “All right. Use all four bishops to—” Sverre cut himself off, having noticed that Brat’s man-portable thermonuclear device was out of its holster and firmly fixed in the general’s right hand.

  “Captain Sverre, should you disobey my command, I shall exercise my option to fire this missile, thereby airbursting a one-kiloton warhead within ten inches of your body.” Brat aimed the weapon at Sverre’s stomach. “I hereby order you to terminate Project Citrus. I further order you to feed the following strategic enemy targets into your fire-control computers.” He removed a small key from around his neck and stuck it in the launching pad. “The ICBM complex at Novosibirsk, the ICBM complex at Kirensk, the Strategic Rocket Forces headquarters at Kharkov, the warhead factory at Minsk, the central command post at Gorky, the alternate—”

  “We have always been with you,” interrupted Sverre, his smile ever-growing, his eyes hot and pulsing like those of the vulture George had seen at ground zero, “waiting to get in.”

  “I don’t know what school you went to, Captain,” said Brat, “but at the Air Force Academy they teach that winning is better than losing.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Randstable as he set up his chess pieces. “Oh, God.”

  Sverre placed a bony, weathered hand on George’s shoulder. “I think we’ll leave the key strategic decision with Mr. Paxton here. Say the word, George, and I’ll send all thirty-six of my Multiprongs, fully armed, against the enemy. A grand-scale one hundred and forty-four megaton retaliatory strike.”

  “You want me to decide?” said George.

  “Yes,” said Sverre.

  “Me?”

  “Correct.”

  “Why me?”

  “I’m curious to see what will happen.”

  George did not think it right for the fate of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to be in his hands.

  “I’m not really qualified for this,” he said.

  “You’ve fought as many nuclear wars as the rest of us,” said Sverre.

  A mile-high tombstone appeared in George’s mind, Design No. 1067 in Vermont blue-gray. A million names were inscribed in the granite. DULUTH. DODGE CITY. SAN FRANCISCO. PHILADELPHIA. CHRYSLERS. CBS. XEROX CORPORATION. THE SUPER BOWL.

  What had Sverre called it? A retaliatory strike? A fair and reasonable notion. They sandblasted us. We must do the same to them.

  And yet…

  “Tell me if I’ve got this straight, Brat,” said George. “You want to blow up Russia, correct?”

  “I want to kill the Soviets’ reserve ICBMs and prevent their being salvoed in subsequent attacks,” Brat replied.

  “Why?” asked George.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, why?”

  “National defense, that’s why.”

  “Yes, yes, I can understand that,” said George. “Sure. However, if we’re going to have national defense, Brat, don’t we also need, well…you know…”

  “What?” said Brat.

  “A nation.”

  “It’s a necessary condition,” said Randstable, whose left cerebral hemisphere was preparing to play chess with his right. “Please put that thing away before you get us all killed.”

  “If we don’t take out their reserves,” Brat insisted, “the Soviets will use them to hunt down the survivors.”

  “Painful as it may be, I think we must conclude that MARCH is no longer the operative strategy here,” said Randstable, staring blankly at the chessboard. “We’ve even gone past the SPASM, I’d say—the motive matrix is completely different now.” He turned suddenly toward Sverre, his fingers splayed and wriggling. “But then why this Antarctica business?”

  “Your job for the present,” said the captain, “is to work with Dr. Valcourt on conquering your survivor’s guilt.”

  Brat perspired and trembled, as if gripped by a high fever. “You want a motive, William? I’ve got a motive. Vengeance may not be a pretty word, but it’s what’s expected of us.”

  “Right!” said Sverre. “We owe it to all those millions of dead people to make more millions of dead people. Be careful how you rewrite strategic doctrine, General, or you’ll come out of this war without a single medal. Mr. Paxton, I need your answer.”

  XEROX CORPORATION. THE SUPER BOWL. MAXWELL HOUSE COFFEE. HERSHEY BARS. THE WORLD SERIES. CHEERIOS. AUNT ISABEL. COUSIN WILLIE. NICKIE FROSTIG. JUSTINE PAXTON. HOLLY PAXTON.

  Vengeance. George pictured the word in his mind. Obviously Brat felt strongly about it. Still, the strategic decision is mine, he thought—mine and mine alone. An epitaph materialized at the bottom of the mile-high tombstone. A ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR MEGATON RETALIATORY STRIKE WILL NOT BRING US BACK, it said.

  That settled the matter.

  “I believe I would like to start having fresh orange juice with my breakfast,” said George. “Keeps aw
ay the scurvy, I hear.”

  “Lousy decision, Paxton,” fumed Brat. “Really bad.”

  “I’m sorry,” George said softly.

  The general’s forehead threw off hot droplets. “Ten seconds, Captain. That’s all you’ve got, and then David fires his slingshot. Nine…eight…seven…”

  “He’s bluffing,” said Randstable, who still hadn’t made an opening move. “I’ll give you a hundred to one odds he won’t do it.”

  Sverre went to his writing desk and continued the Saga of Thor. Brat retargeted the missile.

  “Six…five…four…”

  “I don’t believe I have any,” said Randstable.

  “Any what?” asked Sverre.

  “Three…”

  “Survivor’s guilt,” said Randstable.

  “Two…”

  “We can fix that,” said Sverre.

  An uncanny noise issued from the MARCH Hare. George thought of the cackling piped into the funhouse at the Wildgrove Apple Blossom Fair. Brat’s now flaccid fingers uncurled, and the little missile clattered impotently to the floor. Lying on the rug, it looked more toylike than ever.

  “I’ve never seen one of those before,” said Sverre, pointing to Brat’s defenses with his quill pen.

  The MARCH Hare collapsed on the sofa, guzzled some gin, and began mourning his dead country through hyperventilation and high-pitched wails.

  Sverre left his desk, picked up the weapon. “What kind of guidance?”

  “Inertial navigation,” muttered Randstable, “updated by terrain contour matching.”

  “Propulsion?”

  “Air breathing F-218 turbofan engine.”