by James Morrow
“All they want is our ass,” said Wengernook.
“The prosecution will make its opening address,” declared Justice Jefferson.
When Alexander Aquinas stood up, George saw that the forces arrayed against them were formidable indeed. The chief prosecutor was well over six feet tall. His head looked like a sculpture of itself—rough-hewn, bleak, larger than life. His shaggy gray hair and thick neck suggested that he owned lion genes. Slowly he walked to the bench, turned, and stared toward the gallery with the intensity of a man having a private audience with an angel. He smiled.
“That this is the most important legal proceeding of all time cannot be doubted. The great precedents—Jerusalem and the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Nuremberg and the trial of Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, and others—will in the early days guide us like beacons set along a storm-lashed shore, but then we must head for open sea, with only our remembered humanity to guide us.”
“He thinks like a girl,” said Brat.
“Shut up,” said Overwhite.
“It is a strange proceeding,” continued Aquinas. “It is both a war crimes trial and a peace crimes trial, with the peace crimes perhaps being more damnable—certainly more incomprehensible—than the war crimes.” Spinning around, he fired a long, accusing finger toward the glass booth. His eyes trembled in his great skull like poached eggs. “For these men knew what the fusion bomb could do. They knew that deterrence through terror, which they misnamed ‘defense,’ could not last forever. Indeed, they were often among the loudest, though rarely among the most eloquent, critics of the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.”
George reminded his spermatids that he and his five friends were innocent.
“And yet, in place of mutual assured destruction, they offered nothing. No—worse than nothing. They offered their infatuation with nuclear weapons—an infatuation they expressed in elaborate plans for winning nuclear wars…even if winning meant, and I quote from a speech by the defendant Wengernook, ‘that no enemy are left alive, but two Americans, male and female, have survived to start the race up again.’”
“Can’t you use a goddamn metaphor any more without being dragged into court?” asked Wengernook.
“Do you really think one man and woman could start everything up again?” asked George.
“Of course,” said Wengernook. “Assuming they got along.”
A calculated rage was building in Aquinas. “And the people said, ‘You must not do this!’ And the defendants said, ‘You cannot stop us!’
“And the people said, ‘We want to live!’ And the defendants said, ‘The weapons are here to stay!’
“And the people said, ‘We want grandchildren!’ And the defendants said, ‘Don’t be so idealistic!’”
A gallows grew in George’s mind, the blood-sculpture that Sverre’s navy had fashioned at the celebration banquet. His dark, wet body dripped from the noose. He wondered what it was like to hang. He imagined himself at the moment of release, reaching up, grabbing the rope, hoisting himself back to life with a great muscled arm…
“The fusion bomb was a costly mistress. Consider, your Honors. In 1979 this planet celebrated the International Year of the Child. Of the one hundred and twenty-two million children born that year, one of every ten was dead by 1982, and most died for lack of inexpensive food and vaccines. Yet in 1982 the world spent one trillion dollars on weapons. One trillion dollars!”
George’s arm slipped. The noose tightened.
“Lays it on with a trowel,” said Brat.
“Two trowels,” said Wengernook.
“Let us jump ahead,” said Aquinas. “In the year of the holocaust, the price of one new missile-carrying submarine equaled the combined education budgets of twenty-three developing countries…”
For the next half-hour the chief prosecutor reeled off similar statistics, most of them including the word “children.”
“Nuclear weapons were the cheap defense,” Wengernook explained to his co-defendants. “Can’t anybody get that straight?”
When Aquinas went back to his table, an associate prosecutor gave him hot cocoa while a deputy prosecutor delivered a computer printout.
“At 7:34 on a Saturday morning,” said Aquinas, “Eastern Standard Time, early warning systems detected the launch of ten Spitball cruise missiles from Soviet long-range manned bombers in a holding pattern near the Arctic Circle. NORAD computers inside Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, calculated the missiles’ trajectories, naming Washington, DC, as their target and giving 9:06 as the estimated time of detonation. A preemptive strike was evidently under way, with decapitation of the American command-and-control infrastructure as its primary objective.”
Aquinas presented the printout to Justice Jefferson, who put on her whalebone glasses and studied it with morbid curiosity.
“At 7:40 all strategic forces were placed on full alert,” the chief prosecutor continued. “At 7:52 satellite views confirmed that the detection was not due to an anomalous phenomenon. At 8:07 the NORAD computers and the SAC computers began debating their options. At 8:08 the debate ended when the computers voted to recommend anticipatory retaliation against Soviet ICBM fields as per the MARCH Plan. At 8:25 the President was taken from the White House by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base, where he was subsequently spirited away by an airborne command post and never heard from again…
“And so the world went to thermonuclear war. First strike, second strike, third, fourth. Keep it clean. Keep it surgical. Go for the other side’s war-waging capability, that’s all.” Aquinas gave a small, quick smile. “Ah, but what if that war-waging capability embraces civilian population centers? There is a breezy little term for this particular brand of nuclear strategy. The term, learned judges, is city-busting.” He hurled his mug across the courtroom, cocoa trailing behind like rocket exhaust. “But wait!” he screamed as the mug shattered. “Could not the leaders of the superpowers see that they were dragging the human species into extinction? Of course they could. The leaders of the superpowers, however, were not beholden to the human species, but only to their respective sovereign states. How were they to explain the loss of so much for nothing? The destruction of a few cities was not a reason to quit, it was a reason to risk the rest.”
Returning to the prosecution table, Aquinas picked up a copy of the McMurdo Sound Agreement.
“Thus were the Major Attack Options implemented,” he said matter-of-factly. “Thus did the world follow the maps of hell so diligently drawn by Robert Wengernook, Brian Overwhite, Major General Roger Tarmac, Dr. William Randstable, Reverend Peter Sparrow, and George Paxton.”
The prosecutor caressed the barbed-wire binding of the agreement. A pearl of black blood appeared on his index finger. He moved the finger across the cover, drawing an X in blood.
“If faced with the unenviable task of defending these six men, I would perhaps argue that they had no choice. Their adversary was piling weapon upon weapon, and their only option was to do likewise. But that is a false argument. It was possible to rid the planet of the nuclear threat. Not by organizing a world government or bringing heaven to earth, but by diplomatic measures fully within the defendants’ knowledge and capabilities. As the case for the prosecution unfolds, you judges will learn exactly what this solution was. The gravamen of the charges against these men lies in their deliberate refusal to consider it. In short, the prosecution is prepared to prove criminal negligence on a scale the world has never seen before—and will never see again!”
Aquinas sat down and accepted handshakes from his assistants.
Although George’s worst fear—that the courtroom would erupt in thunderous applause—was not realized, he did see smiles lighting the faces of almost everyone in the gallery. Many spectators, including several of the Mount Christchurch reporters, pantomimed the act of clapping. A young woman, manifestly gripped by a variety of romantic fantasies involving Aquinas, trembled and wept.
“This guy’s full of yams,” said Brat.
“Diplomat
ic measures—hah,” said Overwhite.
“No doubt he leaves a note to the tooth fairy whenever his dentures fall apart,” said Wengernook.
“I never drew a map of hell,” said George.
“The tribunal will recess for lunch,” said Justice Jefferson.
SEVERANCE PETITION DENIED, proclaimed the slopes of Mount Christchurch. AQUINAS MAKES MAGNIFICENT OPENING ADDRESS.
Slowly, Martin Bonenfant approached the bench. His stride was a kind of ambulatory Rorschach test. One could project anything one fancied into it anxiety hiding behind a facade of confidence, confidence hiding behind a facade of anxiety, anxiety and confidence in dynamic equilibrium.
“Learned judges, citizens of Antarctica, friends.” Bonenfant’s words rolled hesitantly from between lips set in the slightest of smiles. “This morning the prosecution addressed us in the language of passion. I cannot condemn his ploy, for atomic weaponry is an invention worthy of no other emotion save horror. Your verdict, however, will be a judgment not on nuclear war but on policies designed to avert, control, and mitigate nuclear war. This case must be decided on the basis of facts, not feelings.
“The first fact, one you will repeatedly be asked to appreciate in the coming weeks, is the extreme improbability of the recent extinction.” His voice was stronger now, his inflections lilting and smooth. “If I may use a crude analogy, for I lack Mr. Aquinas’s way with words, it would be this—the chances of the war unfolding as it did, with such a regrettable outcome, were about the same as those of a woman who takes contraceptive pills getting pregnant by her infertile lover.”
Of the four judges, only Theresa Gioberti seemed offended. The others beat down smiles.
An unlikely extinction, thought George. That’s an excellent point, he decided.
“The second fact is that my clients, far from wishing to fight World War Three, devoted their professional lives to its prevention. Look toward the dock. You will see not war planners but patriots. If these men are guilty, your Honors, then their crime is limited to a count not listed in the McMurdo Sound Agreement, a count called ‘Love of Peace.’”
“He’s good,” said Wengernook.
“He’s very good,” said Brat.
“The only game in town is not necessarily crooked,” said Randstable.
“Which brings us to the third fact,” said Bonenfant. “The threat to peace. Right before Mr. Aquinas gave his address, I bet my two assistants that he would get through it without once mentioning the Russian Communist Empire by name. He never did. Twice he used the word ‘Soviet,’ once the word ‘adversary.’
“Your Honors, do you know what nation, prior to the war, was engaged in the largest military buildup of all time?” The advocate’s glossy black hair had taken on a life of its own, slapping his forehead, flying skyward. “Do you know what nation violated virtually every arms control agreement it ever signed? Slaughtered millions of its own citizens in the name of collectivizing agriculture? Employed illegal chemical and biological weapons in Southeast Asia? Persecuted more Jews than anyone since Adolf Hitler? Routinely imprisoned its pacifists and dissidents in psychiatric hospitals?”
In George’s mind the blood-gallows had melted completely away. By God, he thought, we do have a case. We’re innocent after all.
“Spreading outward since the October revolution, the cancer of Russian Communism engulfed country after country. Azerbaijan. Armenia. The Ukraine. Estonia. Latvia. Lithuania. Poland. Rumania. East Germany. Hungary. Czechoslovakia. Item—in 1983, a Prague grocery clerk was sentenced to five years at hard labor for possessing an unregistered mimeograph machine. Item—reliable observers report that, as part of its campaign of terror in Afghanistan, the Soviet army air-dropped toys into the villages for the little boys and girls of the tribes. Each toy was equipped with explosives that detonated when picked up, commonly blowing off a child’s arm…”
Bonenfant had a hundred more items ready. The frigid afternoon disappeared, replaced by a bottomless pit of betrayal and atrocity. Whenever George blinked he saw a little Afghan girl picking up a doll. He could not bring himself to visualize the explosion.
“Why are there no Soviet defendants in this courtroom? Where is the Secretary General of the Communist Party? The Commander in Chief of the Warsaw Pact? The Minister of Defense? Their absence speaks volumes. The framers of the McMurdo Sound Agreement knew there was no point in putting Soviets on trial, so manifestly guilty was Moscow of turning the world into an armory and ruining the peace that was my clients’ daily dream.”
We’re going to win, George told his spermatids.
“Following a mandate from the electorate, acting with the consent of the governed, the men in the dock sought to check the expanding Soviet tumor using whatever technologies were available. Mr. Aquinas has questioned the wisdom of defending freedom with thermonuclear weapons. Permit me to enumerate the successes of this doctrine.
“The Berlin airlift. The end of the Korean War. The honorable resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. Analysts have linked all of these triumphs—and more—to US nuclear capabilities. If history teaches us anything, it’s that tyrants are tempted by weakness and tempered by displays of strength. Does anyone here seriously doubt that, above all else, the Soviet Union respected military might?”
I certainly don’t doubt it, George thought.
“For nearly half a century, peace reigned in Western Europe. Why? NATO’s theater nuclear forces. During those same decades, the planet suffered no global-scale wars. Why? America’s strategic nuclear forces. This is an astonishing record. Indeed, it is fair to say that, between the Second and Third World Wars, these weapons saved more human lives than penicillin.”
Before hurling out his final sentences, Bonenfant rose to full height. To George, the advocate had never looked more mature.
“And so I ask—who among your Honors, who among the prosecutors, who among the spectators in this courtroom would have dared renounce such a sturdy doctrine, leaping into the awesome uncertainties of a non-nuclear world? Who here would have dared do that? Who?”
As Bonenfant settled behind the defense table, Parkman gave him cocoa capped by two marshmallows. He took a long, leisurely swallow.
Delighted chatter floated through the glass booth. Overwhite remarked that Bonenfant knew his stuff. Wengernook noted that the cancer metaphor was “unexpectedly rich.” Sparrow complained that the advocate had “said nothing about their atheism.” Brat asserted that they had “won the opening round, hands down.” His friends’ happiness gave George a satisfaction he had not known since Mrs. Covington had unveiled his forthcoming family.
He studied the bench. The faces of Justices Yoshinobu and Gioberti had lost the dark flush of unadmitted blood. Eyes shut, mouth drooping, Justice Wojciechowski looked like a man praying to a god in whom he did not believe.
“The tribunal will recess until nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” said Shawna Queen Jefferson in a hoarse and troubled voice.
“Fellas,” said Randstable, “I think we’ve got ourselves a game.”
CHAPTER 13
In Which the Prosecution’s Case Is Said to Be a Grin without a Cat
Like white paper stalagmites, stacks of documents grew from every flat surface in the courtroom. The documents flowed down the aisles and splashed across the judge’s bench. Day after day, each passing with the speed of a snail navigating glue, Aquinas’s staff read aloud articles from Strategic Doctrine Quarterly by Brat Tarmac. Grim-lipped stenographers scribbled down arms control agreements negotiated by Brian Overwhite. Weary translators repeated descriptions of blueprints bearing William Randstable’s name. The tribunal heard speeches by Robert Wengernook, entire bestselling books by Reverend Sparrow, and a scopas suit sales contract signed by George Paxton. Memoranda, monographs, reports, resolutions, directives, letters, field manuals, and Republican Party platforms gradually entered the record.
“The judges are growing restive,” observed Randstable.
“Bored o
ut of their trees,” said Brat.
“Mr. Aquinas,” said Justice Jefferson, pushing documents aside with a windshield-wiper sweep of her arm, “the court believes it is time you examined your first witness.”
Aquinas pulled a deposition from his scopas suit and smoothed it out on the prosecution table.
“In the McMurdo Sound Agreement,” he said, rising, “a date is written, a date so notorious that few of us are willing to speak its name. On this date the Third World War began. According to another calendar, however—the calendar by which we would all have been admitted—something else happened, would have happened, on this date. On this date certain American citizens would have begun to see a way out of the nuclear miasma. Subsequent days would have found them talking among themselves, and then to their children. The children would have grown up…The prosecution calls Brigadier General Quentin Flood, United States Army.”
The witness entered the courtroom at the head of an invisible parade. Assuming the stand, he exuded an aura that George was inclined to call gallantry. He seemed chipped from the Tarmac stone—sturdy, handsome, flamboyant. His scopas suit displayed a mass of ribbons and medals.
“Who could this jerk be?” said Wengernook.
“Leave it to the Army to give the world another asshole,” said Brat.
The rabbity little court usher scurried over, pulled a Bible from his unzipped suit, and asked the witness whether he intended to speak the pure truth. “I do,” said Flood.
“At what age did you gain the continent?” asked Aquinas.
“Forty-two.”
“According to your memories, would you have founded an organization called Generals Against Nuclear Arms?”
“Correct.”
“Forty-two. That’s young for a brigadier general.”
“Mine was a new breed.” Flood had a melodious southern drawl. “Spoilers, they called us.”
“What did you spoil?”
“Nuclear strategy.”
“As defined by Secretary Wengernook and General Tarmac?”
