James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

Jennifer who?

Jennifer Poopie Diapers Stupid Dumb Face!

And then she and her friend would dissolve in giggles, overwhelmed by preschool social satire.

Knock-knock.

‘Who’s there?’ George didn’t really need to ask. The knock was as characteristic as a fingerprint. ‘It’s open, Brat.’

The MARCH Hare pushed boisterously into the cabin – a one-man infantry charge. Accompanying him was a fiftyish man with a dark razoring stare and a marionette’s gangly frame.

‘Meet Dr William Randstable,’ said Brat. ‘The whiz kid of Sugar Brook Lab and, it is rumored, a certifiable genius.’ The general had lost some weight, and the bags under his eyes looked like change purses. ‘William, this is George Paxton – the poet laureate of Wildgrove, Massachusetts.’

‘I’m not really a whiz kid any more,’ said Randstable. His suit was several sizes too large. ‘More of a whiz middle-aged man.’

‘I hear you once beat the Russian chess champion,’ said George.

‘I made the next-to-the-last mistake,’ said Randstable modestly.

Brat patted his man-portable thermonuclear device. ‘Well, men, looks as if some more fat is about to enter the fire.’ His words fought past a trembling throat and clenched teeth. ‘They’re planning to knock over the remaining enemy missile fields at fourteen hundred hours. If we hurry to the launch control room, we can catch thirty-six Multiprongs go galloping off like Grant took Richmond.’

‘Sugar Brook did the technical support for Multiprong guidance and control,’ said Randstable with a quick chuckle. He removed his horn-rimmed eyeglasses and began chewing on the ear piece. ‘I always wondered how I’d feel on the day they actually left the nest.’

‘Pretty upset, I guess,’ said George. An understatement, he concluded from what came out of Randstable’s chest, a conglomeration of sighs and uncontrolled wheezing.

After moving down a narrow passageway crowded with pipes, ducts, ladders, and stopcocks, the three evacuees came upon a hatch labeled RECREATION AREA: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Brat decided they were authorized personnel. Crossing over, they entered a throbbing undersea metropolis, each facility scaled to the constraints of submarine space. They started along a corridor named Entertainment Lane. George noted a compact skating rink, a slightly abbreviated bowling alley, a miniature golf course where every hazard entailed placing the ball in one orifice or other of a plaster mermaid, and a pair of succinct indoor swimming pools. The enlisted men’s pool was eight feet deep, the officers’ ten. A waking nightmare seized George – Peach and Cobb wrapping his body in chains and throwing him into the officers’ pool. Or perhaps they would favor the bowling alley. They would tie him up and leave him behind the pins.

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—