This is the Way the World Ends (25 page)

‘West Germany doesn’t exist.’

‘Just answer the question.’

The general’s mouth melted into a frown. ‘Battlefield nuclear weapons might have been useful in the immediate crisis. But after that—’

‘Useful, did you say?’

‘Useful in the—’

‘One final question. Exactly how many Soviet officers belonged to this organization of yours?’

‘There were no Soviet military officers in Generals Against Nuclear Arms. However, we did—’

‘
How
many Soviet officers?’

‘None,’ grunted the witness.

‘Thank you, General Flood.’ Bonenfant strutted away from the stand, a smile strung between his bulging cheeks like a hammock.

‘We blew him out of the water, don’t you think?’ said Brat.

‘Definitely our inning,’ said Wengernook.

‘Definitely,’ said George.

After lunch Aquinas called to the stand a rosy, elfin woman dressed in a black scopas suit with an inverted collar. She was rolypoly and roly again.

‘A lady?’ said Brat. ‘They’re using a lady against us?’

‘They’re getting desperate,’ noted Wengernook.

The witness was sworn in on a Douay Bible, giving her name as Mother Mary Catherine.

‘If admitted, would you have been a Catholic priest?’ asked Aquinas.

‘Yes.’

‘Female Catholic priests used to be a rare commodity.’

‘Times change.’

‘Were you also a Vice President of the United States?’

‘I would have been, yes.’

‘And did you leave office before serving out your term?’

‘When I accepted the second spot on the ticket, I had a secret in my heart.’ Mother Mary Catherine’s high, scratchy voice suggested an early Hollywood sound film. ‘I knew that, shortly after being elected, I would resign over my President’s defense policies.’

‘And who would that President have been?’

‘He’s over there in the dock – Reverend Peter Sparrow.’

George glanced at the defendant in question. Flabbergasted by the news of his would-be election, Sparrow alternately smiled and grimaced.

Mother Mary Catherine turned to the bench, winked impishly, and said, ‘Be sure to convict that chucklehead. He thinks a country’s Christianity is measured by the size of its thermonuclear arsenal.’

Sparrow now wore the look of a boy engaged in wetting his pants.

‘Objection!’ shouted Bonenfant, rising. ‘The witness is giving slander, not testimony!’

As Justice Jefferson instructed the stenographers to delete Mary Catherine’s last remark, a glimmer of chagrin crossed the prosecutor’s face. He denied his distress with a smile and said, ‘Before resigning, you would have used your office in an unorthodox manner.’

‘Let’s face it, Mr Aquinas, I was a cut-up.’

‘Some of your activities—’

‘Stunts. They were stunts.’

‘Didn’t you propose a rather strange arms control agreement?’

‘I tried to start something called SWAP – the Strategic Weapons Adjustment Plan.’ Mary Catherine folded her hands and placed them on her lap in a neat little bundle. ‘The idea was to let the superpowers build any sort of crazy arsenals they wanted, but with the stipulation that they would trade once finished. No quicker way to get the warheads defused, I figured.’

‘You also wanted to set up Genocide Prevention Centers.’

‘Telephone hotlines staffed twenty-four hours a day. Whenever a missile engineer got the urge to design some fiendish new weapon system, he would call his nearest Genocide Prevention Center and somebody would try talking him out of it.’

‘Tell us about the Preschooler Empowerment Act.’

‘If adopted, it would have prevented the Pentagon from contracting for a new type of bomber or missile until its pros and cons had been explained to a four-year-old chosen at random from any nursery school in Washington, DC. Whatever the four-year-old decided, that was the weapon’s fate.’

A dozen spectators held up a huge banner.
WE LOVE YOU, MOTHER MARY CATHERINE
, it said.

‘I would like the tribunal to know about your National Day of Shame,’ said Aquinas.

‘My husband’s idea, really. We called for everyone involved with thermonuclear weapons – technicians, politicians, professors – to stay out of work for a day. We said that the next morning they should bring in notes from their mothers.’

‘Notes saying. . .’

‘ “My child was absent yesterday because he was sick of being up to his neck in excrement.” ’

‘Nuclear weapons make you mad, don’t they, Mother Mary?’

‘Mad as a hornet.’

‘No further questions.’

In the gallery a second banner was unfurled:
MOTHER MARY CATHERINE FOR SAINTHOOD
.

‘Well, men, what do you think?’ said Brat.

‘She said nothing we haven’t all heard before,’ Sparrow replied.

‘Except the stuff about your being elected President,’ said Wengernook.

‘There’s no telling what a Christian will be called upon to do,’ said Sparrow.

‘Congratulations,’ said George.

‘You would have gotten my vote,’ said Brat.

Eyes flashing, mouth set in a formidable smile, Bonenfant charged up to the stand.

‘He’d better go easy,’ said Wengernook. ‘Everybody likes a nun.’

‘She’s a priest,’ said Randstable.

‘She’s heading for hell,’ said Sparrow.

‘She’s unadmitted,’ said Overwhite. ‘She’s in hell.’

The chief counsel began, ‘Miss Catherine – these various antics of yours, how do you suppose they went over in Moscow?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘The old men in the Kremlin must have been delighted knowing that an American Vice President was calling for SWAP talks and so on.’

‘I’ve never visited the Kremlin.’

‘Evidently not. Now, when you first proposed the Soviet Day of Shame, was the plan to hold it simultaneously with the American one? Or did you perhaps neglect to call for a Soviet Day of Shame?’

‘My goal was to educate the American public concerning the absurdities of—’

‘Just answer the question, please. Did you or did you not call for a Soviet Day of Shame?’

‘I did not.’

‘He’s got her on the run,’ said Brat cheerfully.

‘Nuns don’t hold up over the long haul,’ said Wengernook.

‘She’s a priest,’ said Randstable.

‘You realize, I am sure,’ said Bonenfant, ‘that these pacifist ideas of yours go against the Catholic Church’s doctrine of just war.’ He illustrated the word
pacifist
with a smirk. ‘Don’t you think perhaps you should have been born a Quaker?’

‘I think perhaps I should have been
born
.’

‘Did you really
resign
your office, Miss Catherine, or did President Sparrow ask you to step down?’

‘I resigned. I announced that I could no longer be part of an administration that slept with genocidal weapons.’

George was impressed by the way Reverend Sparrow managed to confine his fury within a broad, loving smile.

‘I imagine the Soviets were sorry to see you out of power,’ said Bonenfant. ‘No further questions.’

‘We used to run into her type around Washington,’ said Wengernook. ‘Always yelling for peace, as if we were at war. You can’t be logical with nuns.’

‘She’s a priest,’ said Randstable.

‘Jefferson’s becoming fed up, don’t you think?’ said Wengernook.

‘The whole damn
bench
is becoming fed up,’ said Brat.

George breathed an elaborate sigh of relief. As a Unitarian, he had always found Catholics frightening and vaguely extraterrestrial, all that blood squirting from Jesus’ palms. It could have been much worse.

The following morning a deputy prosecutor told the tribunal that his team would now be introducing a ‘new category of evidence.’ They wanted the judges to see ‘models of the very instruments through which the defendants had committed the extinction.’

‘The court cautions you to keep things moving,’ said Justice Gioberti. ‘We haven’t the luxury of a flexible calendar.’

‘Nothing to worry about, your Honors,’ replied the deputy prosecutor, a tubby man whose stomach kept billowing out of splits in his scopas suit. ‘We have taken steps to guarantee that the presentation will be swift, lucid, and even, if I may be so bold’ – he blew on a tin whistle – ‘entertaining.’

A quick drum roll drew George’s attention to the press box, where the reporters had been evicted in favor of a dance band. The cymbal sounded, the trumpets answered with a salacious fanfare, and then all the musicians launched into an uptempo rendition of ‘Swanee River.’ A line of attractive female associate prosecutors wearing top hats and spangled scopas suits began parading through the courtroom, each carrying an item from America’s pre-war deterrent. Rapidly an ice arsenal accumulated before the bench, dozens of intricately carved replicas. Little frozen missiles piled up, labeled with cardboard tags. Short-range, medium-range, intercontinental. Air-launched, ground-launched, sea-launched. ‘Such as Gloria’s security, Exhibit G here, a solid propellant, mediumrange missile intended for the European theater,’ said the deputy prosecutor. ‘Exhibit H, currently defending our friend Kimberly, represents America’s force of Tomahawk sea-to-surface cruise missiles armed with two-hundred-and-fifty-kiloton . . .’

Warheads appeared. Low-yield, high-yield, enhanced-radiation. ‘Exhibit M being an MK-12 reentry vehicle from the Guardian Angel II ICBM. And now the court will please observe Dolores and her Exhibit N, one of the Navy’s twenty-kiloton nuclear . . .’

Sea mines were paraded through the courtroom. Nuclear land mines, nuclear torpedos, nuclear free-fall bombs.

After lunch the prosecution unveiled a new branch of the ice arsenal, nuclear-capable and nuclear-armed aircraft. ‘Including Shirley’s deterrent, Exhibit T, a Macho Mike helicopter equipped with two nuclear depth charges. We now present the category of nuclear-capable and . . .’

Nuclear-armed ships arrived. Carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines. ‘Such as SSBN 688
Lyndon Johnson
, a high-speed attack submarine armed with Harpoon missiles. Our final weapon, your Honors, Exhibit W, is being fielded by young Wendy. You will observe that it is not made of ice.’

As the band played ‘Camptown Races,’ Wendy carried Brat’s man-portable thermonuclear device to the bench and set it before Justice Yoshinobu.

‘This isn’t likely to explode or anything, is it?’ asked the judge, hefting the weapon.

‘Oh, no,’ said the deputy prosecutor. ‘The firing procedure involves a twelve-digit code and a little brass key. As we all know from personal experience, your Honors, nuclear weapons are one of the safest technologies ever invented.’

‘Place looks like a goddamn toy store,’ said Wengernook.

‘They’re pissed by all this clutter, you can tell,’ said Brat.

‘Really pissed,’ said George. ‘Toy store,’ he added, fighting tears.

At the end of the second week the prosecution called a silver-haired and aristocratic gentleman named Victor Seabird. He was handsome in the way that only advancing age can be, the hand-someness of a deep-rooted tree or an antique clock.

‘Mr Seabird, according to your recollections would you have been the principal American negotiator of the so-called Einstein Treaties?’ Aquinas asked.

‘That is correct,’ said the witness.

Waves of well-being surged through George, as if he were in the presence of Nadine Covington.

‘At the time of the holocaust,’ said Aquinas, ‘nuclear weapons control was the exclusive province of STABLE, the Strategic, Tactical, and Anti-Ballistic Limitation and Equalization talks engineered by the defendant Overwhite. Would the Einstein process have continued his initiatives?’

‘We broke completely with the STABLE approach,’ answered Seabird. ‘It was for shit,’ he added brightly.

‘That’s his opinion,’ muttered Overwhite.

‘Einstein I outlawed anti-satellite technologies,’ said Seabird. ‘Einstein II was a comprehensive test ban. Einstein III extended the 1968 nonproliferation treaty. Einstein IV was a moratorium on warhead assembly and land-based missile deployment. Einstein V halted production of weapons-grade material. Einstein VI mandated the destruction of all nuclear stockpiles. Our basic goal, you see, was to—’

‘Wait a minute,’ interrupted Justice Gioberti. ‘Are you saying you would have abolished nuclear weapons?’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Seabird.

The four judges leaned forward in spontaneous but perfect synchronization.

‘That must have been a hard treaty to negotiate,’ said Justice Wojciechowski.

‘A bear,’ said Seabird.

‘Did it help when you got that funding increase?’ asked Aquinas.

‘The budget of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has traditionally been one ten-thousandth the size of the Defense Department’s,’ said Seabird. ‘When we went into Einstein VI, however, we were nearly as big as the Post Office.’

‘Some of us on the bench are surprised that the Soviets signed Einstein VI,’ said Justice Wojciechowski.

‘Their motives, I believe, were economic. Totalitarian socialism is a foolish enough way to run a country without throwing in an arms race.’

For the next four hours Seabird outlined the details of the abolition regime. Nations included . . . technologies banned . . . timetables . . . verification . . .

‘Verification,’ said Aquinas. ‘I imagine that took several barrels of midnight oil to work out.’

‘God, yes. Don’t remind me.’ When Seabird smiled, another well-being wave hit George. ‘Of course, with an abolition regime, verification is easier than with a more limited agreement, in that a single sighting of a banned weapon is sufficient to prove a violation.’

‘Still, no verification system is perfect,’ said Justice Gioberti.

‘That’s where the space forts came in,’ said Seabird. ‘Orbiting platforms armed with charged-particle beams that could kill enemy missiles during the boost phase. Einstein VI encouraged the nuclear powers to pursue this technology, along with unarmed interceptor-rockets and ground-based laser defenses.’

‘America would have taken the lead here, as I recall,’ said Aquinas.

‘When the Soviet space forts proved unreliable, we saw no alternative but to ship them a few of our prototypes.’