William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

“Do you care, Kazakhs?”

“I’m trained not to care. Just like you, Moreau. Just like all of us. PRP über alles. Six little, six little, six little robots, flying off to war.”

“Five little robots.”

“Yeah.”

“You ever think much about PRP?”

“Only when the colonel stares into my bloodshot eyes at oh-eight-hundred.”

“Like today.”

“It’s such bullshit. Who got the only B-52 off the ground at Fairchild?”

“I don’t mean that part. Not whether you should show up in the morning swallowing aspirin with Listerine. Not the part about writing letters to your congressman or fighting with your husband.”

“Wife. The regs say wife.”

Moreau ignored him. “The sanity part,” she continued. “The part that’s designed to make sure that insane men won’t throw the switch and sane men will.”

“You want insane men doing it?”

“You think sane men would do it?”

Kazakhs, the commander, flinched. He looked at Moreau very carefully. Then he gurgled up a slow, mad cackle and flamboyantly placed his right hand inside his half-open flight jacket. “Josephine, ma chère,” he said in a brutalized French accent, “Pearee is yours for zee bidding, Moscow mine for zee taking.”

“You tried that once before, Nap,” Moreau replied caustically. “In the winter. Froze your pecker, as I recall, giving half the feminine population of Paris a badly needed rest.”

“A rest? Chère, my poor chère. How little you knew in those days. How, my dear, Josephine, did you think I thawed it out?”

“Okay, okay, okay. PRP’s working just fine. It’s got you acting like Napoleon and Tyler acting sane. I’m not sure which worries me more. We’ve got ourselves an Earth-to-Mars case in the basement. He’s really spaced out.”

Kazakhs looked nervously at the radio-channel dial to make sure they were on private, a channel which other crewmen could, but rarely did, interrupt.

“He’s numb. He’s denying. And he’s functioning. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”

“I’ll remind you of that when he wakes up. Meanwhile, Halupalai’s too spooked about his own future, about getting too old to do all this, to do any thinking at all. Too old. Now, that is funny. And Radnor’s too mesmerized by his oath to God and country.”

“That’s PRP, pal. Five little robots, programmed differently but heading in the same direction, flying off to war.” Kazakhs, the commander, paused for a moment. “Or is it four?” His voice went flat and strained.

“You’d love that, wouldn’t you, macho man?” Moreau pronounced it Match-O, with a bite. “Got your hand on your forty-five? No, PRP’s got me hooked, too. Proving I’m one of the boys, just as Match-O as Captain Shazam.”

“There, along with Maggie Thatcher and Indira Gandhi, goes the theory that rule by the womb will save mankind.”

“But that’s what we robots five are doing, commander,” Moreau said. “Remember?”

“Saving mankind from the Red Menace,” Kazakhs responded. “Better dead than Red.”

“We’re deterring war, Kazakhs. Did you forget?” She added the last line with a bite. Kazakhs sat silently a moment, then laughed. She turned away abruptly, angry again.

“Reminds me of my first SAC briefing.” Kazakhs ignored her, continuing to chuckle. “Colonel gave us the full works—failure of deterrence, men, means the failure of our mission! We are here to prevent war, not fight it. But one of the new guys pops up: ‘Does that mean if it all starts we don’t have to go?’ Jesus. You’d think the Russians had just infiltrated a commissar onto the Command Balcony. The colonel wriggled like he had a SAM up his behind. ‘Son,’ he said, the others being men, of course, ‘are you on Dristan?’”

“And you never saw him again,” Moreau said.

“Nope.”

“Probably the sanest one in the room. You tell him nuclear war is insane. So the world goes nuts and he asks if it’s sane or insane to go nuts with it. Not exactly an illogical question.”

“Sanity is what everybody else is doing, Moreau.”

“Right. Like Jonestown. Nine hundred little robots marching up to the Kool-Aid barrel. Like the arms race. Crazy to build fifty thousand nuclear weapons. But if everybody else is doing it, it’s crazy not to build them. That means mass suicide is sane. It’s crazy to do it, but if everybody is doing it, it’s sane. Right?”

“You think too much, college girl,” Kazakhs said. Suddenly he didn’t like this. At all.

“Getting a little close to home?”

“You on Dristan?” the commander asked, his voice betraying no humor at all. “Be careful. PRP would give you the hook right now. Pull your ejection lever.”

“When we get back, you can report me to PRP while I’m turning you in to the Equal Rights Commission.” She paused. “Dristan. You never did understand the narcotic, did you? Pumping your goddamn quarters into that goddamn machine. You got better. It got better.” She paused again. “Who won, Kazakhs?”

Kazakhs looked at her curiously, then very carefully. He wanted her to stop. Now. But Moreau, caught up in it all, went on.

“Remember Yossarian in Catch-22? Only sane man in a crazy world. So sane they thought he was crazy. He didn’t want to fly his B-25 on any more of those World War II suicide runs. So he told the shrinks he was crazy. And why do you think you’re crazy, Yossarian? Because I don’t want to fly anymore. Then you must be sane, because it’s crazy to want to fly into flak and Messerschmitts. You mean you think I’m crazy but if I’m crazy enough to want to stop flying I must be sane because it’s crazy to want to fly? That’s right, Yossarian. Catch-22.”

“Next,” Kazakhs said wearily, “you’ll tell me B-25 spelled backwards is B-52.”

“Very shrewd, Kazakhs.”

“I think you’d better shut up. Now.”

“Oh, don’t worry, commander. PRP’s working. The five little robots are droning mechanically along. We’re all heading for Irkutsk on the Doomsday Express, each for our own individualized, preprogrammed reasons. Me too. PRP’s ingenious. PRP’s the Catch-22 of World War III. Commander. Sir.”

Kazakhs tuned her out. Damn her. This was a new side of her. Unexpected. But he blamed himself for playing along with her too long. Everyone was spooking. Even he was spooking.

The plane hit another pocket of clear-air turbulence. Thwack! The big bomber shuddered. Moreau efficiently pulled on the wheel, flicked out the Master Caution light, and did a routine sweep of the instrument readings.

She’s all right, Kazaklis decided. Her way of venting. Everyone in the plane could use some venting, but he didn’t want the rest of the crew hearing hers. He switched to all channels.

“This is your captain speaking,” Kazaklis said brightly. “On behalf of Strangelove Airlines and your flight crew I’d like to welcome you aboard our Stratocruiser flight to Irkutsk, with possible intermediate passovers—little pun there, folks, heh-heh, for our Jewish passengers—in Leningrad, Moscow, Vladivostok, and other scenic Soviet cities. Our estimated time of arrival in Irkutsk is ten p.m. local time. Barring local air-traffic problems, folks, and you, heh-heh, know how pesky those can be…”

The pilot’s mind was racing in one direction while his words moved in another. Damn, he wished he would hear something. From Omaha, from the Pentagon, from the Looking Glass. From the tanker. From somebody.

“…As you may have noticed, we have been experiencing some mild clear-air turbulence. Absolutely nothing to concern you, of course. For those of you who are not familiar with our safety procedures, however, I wish to point out that the little red lever to the left of your seat is not an armrest. I repeat, the little red lever is not an armrest…”