John Sayles - The Anarchist's Convention and Other Stories

"Now, a ballistic missile is a quick draw, greased lightning compared to one of the old B-52's or the Tupelev-2o Bears the other side had. And there's no pilot error, a BM is a mechanical kamikaze. But in the early fifties it ran on liquid fuel that had to be mixed just before firing, it had to be launched from the surface. What we in the trade call a soft zone. Made folks think their own hardware could be totaled by a strike and they wouldn't get a shot off. So it was itchytrigger-finger days, days of the Golfer and Dulles and brinksmanship. Everyone obsessed with getting their rockets into the air first, thought that would decide the whole ball game."

Liz & Diclat blared the cover of Derry's magazine. Sonny & Cher & Jackie & Burt & Dean & Frank & Elvis & Lucy & Liza & The Lennon Sisters. Derry lay on her stomach and slowly kicked her feet to the time of her loud gum-chewing. She munched and sucked and smacked and smiled over to Brian every now and then.

Our Father who art in Heaven, thought Brian, hallowed be Thy name -

"Then the boys in the lab come up with solid fuel. So all those missiles could be hardened, dug down into silos or onto submarines. Our Minuteman silos can take, oh, three hundred-pounds-per-square-inch overpressure. This place can handle four hundred. Need an awful good shot with some heavy yield to crack that.

"Anyhow, the name of the game turned into something called 'assured destruction.' Say they launch a first strike against our missile sites, a counterforce strike. Assured destruction means we still have enough throw power and warheads left to inflict what they call 'unacceptable damage.' Now this is with both sides playing by the rules — no spasm war, where its countervalue strikes against cities instead of missiles. We can control it, they say, like always."

… blessed art Thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary…

"Well, all this boiled down to the theory of mutual vulnerability. Neither group would fire first cause it was a sure thing both would be wiped out. That was supposed to be a comfort. Course it isn't the rocket boys down in their mountain bunkers who are mutually vulnerable, no, it's you and me and Ivan Doe over there on the other side. We're mutually vulnerable as you can get. Was about then, under the Harvard Man, that I planned this place."

There was a hole in the seat of Derry's too-tight gym shorts; a round, pink berry of flesh peeped through. Brian had started to smile back at her through the pu#plish fog that had come up in front of him. She would sigh and roll her eyes when her father started up again and Brian would answer with what he thought was a mildly sympathetic smile. He couldn't feel exactly what it was doing on his face though, it tended to get away from him.

"Nowadays things aren't so simple. You've got your antiballistic-missile system and your multiple warheads and better homing systems and you got computers speeding the whole thing up. There's still some conventional stuff, though. Our B-52's and F-i i i's shoot a missile called a Hounddog and the other side still has Bears and Mya Bisons that fire something called a Kangaroo and the yellow-peril folks there have even got a thing to deliver, an old TU-16 Badger, and the whole menagerie is there waiting to come down like a rain of toads."

Treat was up and pacing now, talking faster than ever, building for some kind of climax. The words were making less sense than ever to Brian; it sounded like a sin-blasting Bible sermon in some foreign but familiar language.

"Don't matter what delivers it, you set off your standard twenty-megaton payload and millions of people are going to feel it. That's a thousand times the force of the Fat Man we hit the Japs with. These days you got your thermonuclear reaction, fission-fusion-fission, where the fission generates the heat to set off the hydrogen isotope and deuterium fuses to form helium and enough destructive energy to parboil the state of Nebraska."

The fog was thicker now, it seemed to be falling down from the fluorescent lights, falling like snow in a paperweight. Treat was hoarse, his movements jerky. He was totally mind-fucked, thought Brian, but he seemed to know his stuff.

"And it's not just the two of us anymore. Britain and France, they got it and the yellow-peril folks are making great leaps forward. And the lab boys come up with a synthetic, plutonium. P-239, cheaper to make than U-235 and just about as effective. So we got the nuclear equivalent of the Saturday-night special and before you know it any youngpunk nation looking to build a reputation will have their own bomb. It spreads, it excites the neighboring cells and you can't control it. And us mere people are left out in the rain. People aren't but a fart in a fire storm to them. They'll jacket a warhead with U-238 or cobalt to make it extra dirty, to really set those gamma rays whizzing. They've done studies on how long it would take the country to recover to a certain level after a full-scale war. They've decided what acceptable damage is and I don't accept it."

Treat slumped into a chair.

"The hell with them all."

Derry gathered her magazines and left the room. Brian switched to the Act of Contrition. The fog cleared a bit and he heard the instrument panel plainly again. Treat's head lolled back a little as if he were resting, breathing widemouthed like a fighter between rounds. He was very pale, his hair a thin white. The Mad Mole.

And I detest all my sins, thought Brian, because of the loss of Heaven and the pain of Hell. But most of all

Derry scuffed back into the room. She was in a pink short nightgown and fuzzy slippers that had bunny faces on the toes and cottontails at the heel. She was trying hard to stick out what she had to stick. She looked like a sexy Easter duckling wiggling her tufted butt and breasts. She bounced over and plopped in her father's lap, never taking her eyes off Brian. It was like a toddler showing off a new lollipop, proud and possessive and more than a little taunting. Look what I've got and don't you wish you could get some? Treat kissed the top of her head.

"Night honey. Mr. McNeil is going to be out here on the couch so don't be too noisy in the morning. Gimme kiss."

She rolled her eyes and held her nose and gave him a peck on the cheek. Brian wanted to swat her.

"Night Daddy."

The girl hopped off her father's lap and tiptoed to Brian and kissed him. It was more like a meal than a kiss and he fought to keep his tongue rooted. She skipped away before he could react with much more than a gasp for air. Derry disappeared into her bedroom.

"The light of my life, that one," said Treat. "Worth her weight in gold."

He went on for a bit, running down like a tired phonograph, about the difficulty of judging superiority in the arms race, the relative merits of the Sentinel and Safeguard defense systems, the fallacy of deterrence. He tired and Brian drifted. Finally he pulled the couch out into a bed and showed Brian where the bathroom was.

"Have a safe night," he said, and retired to his room.

A loud fan clicked on with the bathroom light, a highpitched hummer. The toilet bowl looked funny. Brian sat and saw directions pasted on the wall across from him. Close lid, pull lever and waste material will be thermally disposed. The other writing was even stranger. It was on the toilet paper, roughly three letters per sheet in red Magic Marker. See you tonight, it said, Derry. The message and Brian's waste material went out in a thermal hiss.

The pullout bed was comfortable enough but sleep was out of the question. There was the instrument panel noise to contend with, thoughts of what Derry was up to and a new wave of cellular dissipation. Brian remembered from his few real high-school drunks what a tricky business lying down was, that the ceiling tended to revolve in one direction and his stomach in another. But the concepts of stomach and ceiling weren't so definite, the action now wasn't revolution or rotation but Brownian movement. His molecules scattered softly outward till they met dense lead-and-steel molecules that bounced them back in. Sound was included in the deal now, the bleeping and whirrings of the instruments were solid particles pinging in the air-mix with him. Welcome to the oneness of being, thought Brian, and rolled on his front to try and hold some of himself in.