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

by James Morrow

  ‘I’m impressed already,’ said Wengernook.

  ‘They don’t hang guys like this,’ said Brat.

  ‘I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be smart,’ said George.

  Randstable finished explaining how he had checkmated a Russian grand master who was also a KGB agent.

  Bonenfant said, ‘Now during your early days at the Lumen think tank, you—’

  ‘Think tank – is that a kind of weapon?’ asked Justice Yoshinobu.

  ‘No, not a weapon, your Honor,’ said Randstable.

  ‘I picture a Sherman tank with a disembodied human brain inside,’ said the judge.

  ‘That’s actually an interesting idea . . .’ Randstable pulled off his horn-rimmed glasses and chewed contemplatively on the ear piece. ‘The electroneural interface would be the trickiest—’

  ‘The what?’ asked Justice Gioberti.

  ‘Wetware modem,’ said Randstable. ‘Interface is, now that I think about it, a misnomer, since you’d be removing the cranium and stripping out the eyes, nose, and other material.’ He elaborated for several minutes, until Justice Wojciechowski interrupted to remind him that he was on trial for his life. ‘Oh, sorry,’ said the former whiz kid, ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Tell us something about Lumen,’ said Bonenfant.

  ‘Our group analyzed the logical difficulties raised by the superpower arsenals. The epistemological pitfalls of assured destruction, for example, or the tautologies encountered while climbing the ladder of escalation.’

  ‘What did you do about these problems?’ asked Justice Gioberti.

  ‘We thought about them.’

  ‘A nerve-wracking job, I imagine,’ said Bonenfant.

  ‘God, yes. When Sugar Brook Lab made me an offer, I jumped at it.’

  ‘I believe you directed their Inertial Guidance Project.’

  ‘Whenever a nuclear missile came my way, I made it more accurate.’

  ‘How accurate?’

  ‘Imagine Robin Hood standing in Nottingham Square and shooting the apple off William Tell’s kid in Switzerland.’

  Bonenfant issued a slow-motion smile. ‘What was the ultimate result of inertial guidance?’

  ‘A safer world,’ said Randstable.

  ‘A safer world?’

  ‘Sounds paradoxical, huh? But when you know for sure you can stand on the old pitcher’s mound and throw a strike – that is, when you’re certain of taking out any given silo or command post – the amount of overkill you need goes way, way down.’

  The chief counsel handed his client a large piece of sealskin framed in bone. Two line graphs were painted on one side of the membrane. ‘So as missiles become more accurate, they become less destructive?’ Bonenfant asked.

  ‘Exactly. Now as you can see, ever since the early sixties, megatonnage has steadily decreased in both America and the Soviet Union.’

  ‘How did your guidance device work?’

  The years dropped from Randstable like a heavy overcoat. He was Willie the Wunderkind again. ‘The basic unit was a beryllium ball chock full of gyros and accelerometers,’ he said with the zest of a boy discussing electric trains. ‘Now, my idea was to float the thing inside another ball filled with a nonconducting liquid having neutral buoyancy. Presto! All during flight, the gyros keep warm and steady in their hydrocarbon bath. A human embryo is protected in much the same way.’

  ‘You also supervised the Smart Warheads Project.’

  ‘This approach allowed even greater targeting precision. Each warhead got its own personal computer, right? It could then compare, pixel by pixel, a radar picture of the target terrain with a stored reference image.’

  George liked the word pixel. It sounded like something an elf would use for self-gratification.

  ‘Did Sugar Brook develop the ground-launched Homing Hawk ballistic missile interceptor?’ Bonenfant asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Randstable.

  George remembered that he had been planning to tell Holly a story about an elf who casts a golden shadow.

  ‘I guess it was a great day when you proved that a Homing Hawk could destroy an incoming warhead,’ said Bonenfant.

  ‘We broke out the champagne and got a little bombed.’

  ‘Your Homing Hawk was actually a forerunner of the spacebased defenses Mr Seabird praised so lavishly in his testimony on Einstein VI.’

  ‘I guess it was.’

  ‘You must feel good about that.’

  ‘I feel good about all of Sugar Brook’s accomplishments.’

  ‘The prosecution, I am sure, will suggest that Sugar Brook was a dealer in the death trade, a cornucopia of demonic devices . . . I apologize if I’m stealing your rhetoric, Mr Aquinas.’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ said the chief prosecutor.

  ‘What business were you really in, Dr Randstable?’

  ‘The business of making nuclear weapons obsolete.’

  ‘No further questions.’

  Bonenfant danced merrily back to the defense table.

  ‘That was good, when he mentioned making them more accurate,’ said Brat.

  ‘The part about making them obsolete, that was good too,’ said George.

  After removing his right glove, Aquinas ran an extended index finger along the comforting decline on the sealskin graph. ‘An impressive picture.’

  ‘I think so,’ said Randstable.

  ‘Do you truly believe that the megatonnage would have just kept dropping?’ the chief prosecutor asked.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Down past the extinction threshold?’

  ‘That’s what our extrapolations suggested.’

  ‘There’s another side to this accuracy business, isn’t there?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘As missiles become more accurate, they also become more usable.’

  ‘Yes, but if you ever get to that, it’s better to have usable missiles than unusable ones.’

  ‘Dr Randstable, wasn’t it rather bizarre to be perfecting all these clever technologies knowing that their purpose was essentially psychological – that if they were actually fired, then the world would be better off if they didn’t work?’

  ‘Pessimism had no place at Sugar Brook.’

  ‘Tell me honestly, did you ever pretend that a missile had been successfully tested even though it had gone down in flames?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean, so long as the Soviets believed the thing worked, its deterrent value remained the same. We could have built our whole arsenal out of uncooked spaghetti, right?’

  ‘My client has already answered that question,’ said Bonenfant, rising.

  ‘Let it go, Mr Aquinas,’ said Justice Jefferson.

  When George glanced toward the gallery, he saw that several spectators had opened their veins with razor blades. The steaming blood spelled out SMART WARHEADS ARE A STUPID IDEA in tall, dripping characters.

  ‘You must have been happy when Sugar Brook became the prime contractor for the Homing Hawk interceptor,’ said Aquinas.

  ‘Well, sure. I mean, we were in this life-and-death struggle with Winco Associates and General Heuristics.’

  ‘And then, when you got the Hawks to work, you celebrated with champagne?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Newsweek reported that you drank to “a bad night in the Kremlin.” ’

  ‘To “a sleepless night in the Kremlin,” actually.’

  ‘You didn’t foresee any sleepless nights in the White House?’

  ‘I can’t grasp your logic.’

  ‘Well, each Hawk you deployed would have further blunted Russia’s retaliatory capability, until mutual deterrence was virtually nonexistent. Thinking that America was about to strike first, the Soviets might have struck first.’

  ‘When America had a nuclear monopoly, we did not strike first.’

  Aquinas pulled a folder from one of the evidence piles and shoved it into Randstable’s lap. ‘I would refer you to Document 476, the
1951 edition of the SPASM, the Single Plan for Aligning the Services of the Military. As you know, it calls for the complete pulverization of the Soviet Union – the nuclear strip mining of an entire nation – in response to conventional aggression against Western Europe.’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘To me, Dr Randstable, everything was a long time ago. No further questions.’

  The engineer gangled his way back to the booth and asked, ‘Well, what’s the verdict?’

  ‘You stood your ground,’ said Wengernook.

  ‘I think we’re on top of this thing,’ said Brat.

  ‘I couldn’t follow the part about the embryo,’ said George.

  During lunch – the defendants could choose between killer whale chowder and cold boiled skua – Randstable showed George some chess openings, then challenged him to a game, offering the tomb inscriber a rook advantage and the first move. George had not played since junior high school, but he thought it might be fun to lose to somebody who had beaten a Russian grand master.

  Reverend Sparrow testified next. In a voice that blasted its way into icy nooks and crannies never before visited by human speech, the evangelist told the tribunal how, as an adolescent mired in ‘a slimy pit of drugs and fornication,’ he had one night reached into his parents’ collection of X-rated videocassertes and inadvertently grasped a Bible. He began reading it. He could not put it down. A year later he was attending the Coral Gables Theological Seminary. Before the decade was out, his cable television channel had more subscribers than any except the one sponsored by Crotch magazine, and he had become the youngest person ever to chair the celebrated right-wing Committee on the Incipient Evil.

  ‘This guy makes me nervous,’ said Wengernook.

  ‘No, no, it’s good he’s on the team,’ said Brat. ‘We need a religious component.’

  ‘Your bestselling book,’ said Bonenfant, ‘Christians Will Come Through the First Strike, argued that as the millennium approached, certain Biblical prophecies would be fulfilled. How do your interpretations square with the recent Soviet-American exchange?’

  ‘The Hebrew prophets were right on the money.’ The evangelist unzipped his scopas gear and pulled his little Bible from the vest of his three-piece suit. ‘As you know, that war destroyed the temple at Jerusalem, a prelude to what Christians call the Perfect Exile. In the Perfect Exile, the church – those who have accepted Jesus – is cleaved into seven segments and transported to the far corners of the earth. Which explains why I’m here. If you look in the North Pole and other remote places, you will find boatloads of Christians.’

  ‘And after the Perfect Exile?’

  ‘More explosions – though of course they cannot touch the church. So destructive are these bombs that the survivors succumb to a man who promises peace. But who is he? The Antichrist, that’s who.’

  For the first time in his life, George realized what an intrinsically boring religion Unitarianism was.

  ‘I’m not sure where all this is leading us,’ said Justice Jefferson.

  Sparrow responded by raising his voice. ‘For seven years the Antichrist provokes a series of major nuclear conflicts, including the hundred-thousand-megaton Battle of Armageddon! But then the Son of Man returns in time to prevent total annihilation!’

  ‘Is that pretty much it?’ asked Justice Jefferson.

  ‘The present world vanishes, the Last Judgment occurs, and a New Heaven and Earth appear!’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Eternity,’ said Sparrow quietly.

  ‘Last week,’ said Bonenfant, ‘former Vice President Mother Mary Catherine accused you of measuring a nation’s Christianity by the size of its thermonuclear arsenal.’

  ‘There’s no such passage in any of my writings.’

  ‘But you do advocate peace through strength.’

  ‘If you study the Scriptures with an open mind’ – Sparrow tapped his Bible – ‘you will realize that they urge the United States to regain nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union, a nation that the prophet Ezekiel calls Magog.’

  ‘When I read your books, I saw immediately that you regard nuclear war as a threat that all Christians must work to overcome.’

  ‘Yes, but we shall succeed only through a willingness to bear the sword of God. The Bible teaches that, in a world of fallen men, military force is essential for social order.’

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t be a crime to want social order. No further questions.’

  ‘I’ve never heard that “world of fallen men” hypothesis before,’ said Randstable as he inflicted a fool’s mate on George. ‘Intriguing.’

  ‘We could have used this guy at SAC,’ said Brat. ‘Our public relations director was a washout.’

  Are we going to become fallen men? asked George’s spermatids. I don’t know, he replied.

  Aquinas approached the stand without enthusiasm. The Devil’s advocate, the Lord’s prosecutor – equally thankless jobs. ‘Leafing through your books, I’m struck by all the charts comparing American and Soviet military strength. Don’t these statistics take us pretty far afield from theology?’

  ‘I wanted Christians to understand that the enemy had acquired the edge in every category – throw-weight, conventional forces, you name it. We had to save America while there was still time.’

  ‘Given that America’s demise had already been revealed to the prophets, wouldn’t it be blasphemous to try averting it?’

  ‘God has a plan for us,’ the evangelist explained.

  ‘The title of your last book, Deals With the Devil: A Christian Looks at the STABLE Treaties, speaks for itself. Obviously you do not believe in arms control.’

  ‘I do believe in arms control. What I don’t believe in is appeasement.’ Sparrow’s smile was so sweet it threatened to rot his teeth. ‘After all, Mr Aquinas, the Soviet Union is a police state, isn’t it? There is no way to tell what agreements they’re breaking or what bombs they’re building.’

  ‘If it was impossible to know exactly how many weapons the Soviets had, why did you publish charts showing exactly how many weapons the Soviets had?’

  ‘Those statistics were compiled by the Committee on the Incipient Evil.’

  Aquinas went to a document pile, fished out two paperback books, and opened the one with the mushroom cloud rising over Golgotha. ‘Now, on page one hundred forty-three of God’s Megatons you say, “The approach of Armageddon should cause not fear but joy. For Armageddon is the Lord’s war to cleanse the earth of wickedness.” I wonder how many Christians read this passage and found themselves hoping for a nuclear exchange?’ He consulted the second book. ‘And then, in Christians Will Come Through the First Strike, you quote Zephaniah 1:15, “A day of wrath is that day, a day of thick black clouds, a day of battle alarm against fortified cities, against battlements on high.” You add, “Doesn’t this sound like our second-strike weapons defeating the antiballistic missile system of the Soviet Union?” ’

  ‘I wanted to reveal that, if America were wise enough to avoid the disarmament trap, then the Son of Man could use our arsenal to bring violent judgment against those in Magog who reject the free gift of salvation.’

  ‘Jesus would do that?’

  ‘His First Coming was as the Lamb of God, His Second will be as the Lion.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Aquinas, rolling his eyes into his huge skull. ‘No more questions.’

  ‘Knows his Bible, doesn’t he?’ said Wengernook.

  ‘I always liked the Sermon on the Mount,’ said George. ‘Job has some memorable parts too.’

  ‘I thought you were a Unitarian,’ said Brat,

  ‘Jesus was ahead of His time,’ said Randstable.

  At nine o’clock the next morning, Bonenfant called Wengernook to testify.

  ‘Well, men, here we go,’ said the assistant defense secretary, nervously saluting his co-defendants.

  ‘Just remember, history is on our side,’ said Brat. ‘Strength made the Soviets move cautiously.’


  ‘Watch out for Aquinas’s left hook,’ said Randstable.

  Once on the stand, Wengernook pulled cigarettes and matches from his scopas suit. Justice Jefferson gave him permission to light up.

  Bonenfant said, ‘The prosecution has introduced several documents authored by you, including an address titled “The Soviet Plan for Nuclear Victory” delivered to the Massachusetts Medical Society. Were the Soviets really planning on victory?’

  ‘The evidence was overwhelming,’ said Wengernook. He struck a match, missed the cigarette by inches. ‘Their arsenal was geared to a protracted nuclear war, and they also had an extensive civil defense program. By the time I joined the current administration, Russia had fully embraced the ugly concept of a winner.’

  ‘So America had to configure her own deterrent accordingly?’

  ‘Not only was mutual assured destruction immoral, it had outlived its usefulness. We needed a policy of damage limitation and force modernization, plus a menu of realistic strategic options. In short, a transition from MAD to MARCH.’

  ‘Some people were troubled that MARCH necessitated a large increase in warheads.’

  ‘Under MAD, you could get away with, oh, I don’t know – a couple hundred bombs.’ At last Wengernook made match and cigarette connect. ‘But when your goal is damage limitation, you require a much larger arsenal.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand this “damage limitation” business,’ said Justice Wojciechowski.

  That makes two of us, George thought. That makes four hundred million of us, his spermatids added.

  It took Wengernook most of the morning to clarify the various meanings of damage limitation. ‘So you see, your Honors,’ he concluded, ‘in the awful event that deterrence fails, you want to remove targets selectively. Your missiles must send the right message.’

  ‘What message is that?’ asked Justice Yoshinobu.

  ‘ “We’re not trying to annihilate you, we’re trying to save ourselves. That’s why we’re hitting only your silos, bomber fields, submarine pens, and warhead factories.” ’ Wengernook took a prolonged drag on his latest cigarette. ‘Hence, the enemy is inspired to refrain from a massive attack.’

  ‘So in its early phases such a conflict leads to better communication between the superpowers?’ asked Justice Gioberti.