James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘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.’