This is the Way the World Ends (13 page)

‘If we don’t take out their reserves,’ Brat insisted, ‘the Soviets will use them to hunt down the survivors.’

‘Painful as it may be, I think we must conclude that MARCH is no longer the operative strategy here,’ said Randstable, staring blankly at the chessboard. ‘We’ve even gone past the SPASM, I’d say – the motive matrix is completely different now.’ He turned suddenly toward Sverre, his fingers splayed and wriggling. ‘But then why this Antarctica business?’

‘Your job for the present,’ said the captain, ‘is to work with Dr Valcourt on conquering your survivor’s guilt.’

Brat perspired and trembled, as if gripped by a high fever. ‘You want a motive, William? I’ve got a motive. Vengeance may not be a pretty word, but it’s what’s expected of us.’

‘Right!’ said Sverre. ‘We owe it to all those millions of dead people to make more millions of dead people. Be careful how you rewrite strategic doctrine, General, or you’ll come out of this war without a single medal. Mr Paxton, I need your answer.’

XEROX CORPORATION. THE SUPER BOWL. MAXWELL HOUSE COFFEE. HERSHEY BARS. THE WORLD SERIES. CHEERIOS. AUNT ISABEL. COUSIN WILLIE. NICKIE FROSTIG. JUSTINE PAXTON. HOLLY PAXTON.

Vengeance. George pictured the word in his mind. Obviously Brat felt strongly about it. Still, the strategic decision is mine, he thought – mine and mine alone. An epitaph materialized at the bottom of the mile-high tombstone.
A ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR MEGATON RETALIATORY STRIKE WILL NOT BRING US BACK
, it said.

That settled the matter.

‘I believe I would like to start having fresh orange juice with my breakfast,’ said George. ‘Keeps away the scurvy, I hear.’

‘Lousy decision, Paxton,’ fumed Brat. ‘Really bad.’

‘I’m sorry,’ George said softly.

The general’s forehead threw off hot droplets. ‘Ten seconds, Captain. That’s all you’ve got, and then David fires his slingshot. Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .’

‘He’s bluffing,’ said Randstable, who still hadn’t made an opening move. ‘I’ll give you a hundred to one odds he won’t do it.’

Sverre went to his writing desk and continued the
Saga of Thor
. Brat retargeted the missile.

‘Six . . . five . . . four . . .’

‘I don’t believe I have any,’ said Randstable.

‘Any what?’ asked Sverre.

‘Three . . .’

‘Survivor’s guilt,’ said Randstable.

‘Two . . .’

‘We can fix that,’ said Sverre.

An uncanny noise issued from the MARCH Hare. George thought of the cackling piped into the funhouse at the Wildgrove Apple Blossom Fair. Brat’s now flaccid fingers uncurled, and the little missile clattered impotently to the floor. Lying on the rug, it looked more toylike than ever.

‘I’ve never seen one of those before,’ said Sverre, pointing to Brat’s defenses with his quill pen.

The MARCH Hare collapsed on the sofa, guzzled some gin, and began mourning his dead country through hyperventilation and high-pitched wails.

Sverre left his desk, picked up the weapon. ‘What kind of guidance?’

‘Inertial navigation,’ muttered Randstable, ‘updated by terrain contour matching.’

‘Propulsion?’

‘Air breathing F-218 turbofan engine.’

‘Throw-weight?’

‘Nine pounds.’

Later that day, after the three Erebus evacuees were gone, Sverre ordered his officers and men to their main battle stations. The launch tubes were pressurized to match the outside ocean. The hatches opened. A small rocket in the rail of each Multiprong missile began to burn, boiling pools of water in the tubes. Steam built up, hurling the missiles to the surface, whereupon the main motors ignited. The stages fell away. Within fifteen minutes the warhead buses had scattered their sterile payloads across the Gulf of Mexico, from the Florida Keys to the vanished city of New Orleans.

Like all
Philadelphia
-class fleet ballistic missile submarines, SSBN 713
City of New York
held within its lowest decks a labyrinth of forgotten passageways and unmarked corridors. Leaving Sverre’s cabin, George realized that he and Brat were for the moment not on speaking terms – he could tell by the general’s sour face, his aloof gait – and so he ran ahead, soon finding himself in the submarine equivalent of a back alley. Naked light bulbs swung on brown cords like phosphorescent spiders. The air was murky and still. He became aware of the boat’s sound, a fitful hum. Under other conditions, getting lost this way would have upset him, but he was still feeling extraordinarily good about his strategic decision. Thanks to him, the men, women, and children of the Soviet Union had been spared a retaliatory strike – my monument to Holly, he thought, as glorious and firm as any block of granite.

He pounded on doors. The echoes traveled up and down the empty corridor. He tested the latches. Every cabin was sealed as tight as the cottage-like tomb that the Sweetser family owned back in Rosehaven Cemetery. Fear weaved through his chest and bowels – a creeping conviction that Peach and Cobb would soon appear and inflict some new torture on him. Hell, anybody would have signed that ridiculous sales contract. Anybody. Black blood. Just like Mrs Covington. Certain facts should not be thought about too much. I shall think about something else. Holly saved Russia . . .

Beneath a nearby door, an orange glow advanced and retreated like surf. George approached, knocked.

‘Come in.’

A female voice. Entering, he saw a monster. He stopped dead and thought, yes, they’re on the loose again, trying to intimidate me . . .

It looked like a gigantic winged shark. The eyes shot blood, the nostrils flamed and smoked like the vents of a volcano.

He had seen this species before.

‘Hello, George.’

In the center of the cabin an old woman stood hunched over the sort of antique machine that, as he knew from taking Holly to the Boston Children’s Museum, was called a magic lantern. A cone of smoke-filled light spread toward the projected vulture. Shadows hovered above the woman’s nose and cheeks. She removed the vulture, slipped it under a stack of similar glass paintings.

‘Mrs Covington! I never expected to meet
you
here.’

‘It’s good to see you again, George.’

‘I did those pencil drafts we talked about.’ As usual, Mrs Covington’s presence filled him with well-being. ‘ “She was better than she knew,” remember? “He never found out what he was doing here.” They looked pretty good. Design seven-oh-three-four. I guess they got burned up.’

‘We mustn’t dwell on Wildgrove,’ said Nadine. ‘I loved that town. The children. Nickie Frostig died in my arms. Blast wound.’ She gestured toward the glass slides. ‘Some people say these paintings show the future.’ Her raincoat looked wet and slimy, as if made of live eels. ‘Do you believe in prophecy?’

‘I’m a Unitarian, ma’am.’

‘They’ve been in my family for centuries – painted by Leonardo da Vinci during his last days. The seer Nostradamus – that brilliant, courageous, plague-fighting Renaissance scholar – dictated their content. Want to see the future, George?’

She inserted a new slide. A short, muscular, bearded man stood alone on a boundless plain of ice.

‘My goodness, I guess I really
am
going to Antarctica,’ he said.

She changed slides. George saw himself in the Silver Dollar Casino, playing poker with Randstable and Wengernook.

As the show continued, it proved far more varied and perplexing than the other such presentation he had seen that afternoon. Slide: George sitting at a banquet table, eating ham. Slide: Captain Sverre slashing his own forearm with a knife. Slide: the vulture again, devouring a dead penguin.

A happy family burst upon the wall – husband, wife, young child. They were dressed in scopas suits. The child’s suit was gold. Their various arms and torsos had fused in a complex hug. Their smiles threw back twice the brightness that the lantern flame provided.

No visual image, painted, photographed, or dreamed, had ever moved George so much as that adroitly rendered Leonardo. The child was Holly. Compared with this truth, his realization that the man was himself and that the woman was Dr Morning Valcourt seemed almost dull.

‘I know the man,’ said Nadine. ‘And I’ve seen the woman around here. But the child—’

‘It’s Holly!’ The future! Some people said these paintings showed the future!

‘Nobody except you got out of Wildgrove. Dr Valcourt told you that.’

‘But it
looks
like Holly.’

‘Exactly like her?’

‘Yes. Exactly. Perhaps not
exactly
. But . . . if it’s not Holly, then . . .’

Aubrey?

‘The sister we were going to give Holly?’ he asked.

‘Nobody except you got out of—’

All right. Not her sister. Who then?
He studied Dr Valcourt’s glowing, flickering face. Though ill-equipped for smiling – he remembered her chilly persona, her brisk manner – she was doing an excellent job of it.

‘Holly’s stepsister? Dr Valcourt and I will marry and then have a baby girl?’

‘A reasonable interpretation.’

‘I’ll call her Aubrey.’

‘Lovely name. Do you
like
Dr Valcourt?’

‘Not at all.’ The wrong thing to say, he decided. ‘I’ll
learn
to like her.’ His bullet wound throbbed with excitement. ‘I’ll do anything to get Aubrey. Marry a snake.’

Nadine yanked the family portrait off the screen. ‘Evidently you will become a father again.’

He envisioned the Giant Ride mechanical horse from Sandy’s Sandwich Shop. Aubrey sat bouncing in the saddle, giggling, trilling. Horse. Donkey. Mule. Infertility . . . ‘No, that can’t be right either,’ he said. ‘I’m sterile as a mule. That’s what Dr Brust told me. My secondary spermatocytes . . . the radiation.’

Nadine projected a new slide. A man approached the gates of a fabulous white city. Its marble ramparts glowed beneath a skull-faced moon.

George saw that the pilgrim was himself.

‘Even in this age of chaos,’ said Nadine, ‘there are places one can go to have one’s fertility restored. The earth has its marble cities.’

After swaddling the glass slides in a US Navy bath towel, Nadine slipped them into the pocket of her raincoat. She opened the side of the magic lantern, blew out the flame, and lowered the hot device into a canvas duffel bag.

‘Let me help you with that,’ he said.

She seemed not to hear. Slinging the bundle over her shoulder, she hobbled into the corridor. He followed her up a long spiral staircase. So great was his obsession with the thought of Holly’s reincarnation – Aubrey Paxton, predicted by Nostradamus, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, fathered by George Paxton, borne by Morning Valcourt – that he was taken aback upon seeing that Nadine had led him to the deck of the surfaced submarine. The air was choked with puffs of dark vapor. Waves detonated along the speeding prow. The wind stung his cheeks; it tugged his hair like a comb in the hands of a vindictive parent. God! So cold!

An open sailboat bobbed beside the hull, Nadine sitting in the stern. After hoisting the sail, she reached into her raincoat and pulled out a magic lantern slide, placing her gloved hand over the painted surface to protect it from spray. George took it like a starving man receiving bread.

‘How can I find that city?’ he called.

‘I have no idea,’ she replied, casting off.

‘Was this Nostradamus any good?’

‘He was on to something.’

A great, ever-expanding wedge of ocean and air grew between them. George looked at his Leonardo – the detail was astonishing, like the circuits on a computer chip, and he was especially impressed by the firm, crisp contours of Aubrey’s beautiful face. The wind quickened. Sea water began dripping from his hair. He moved the painting away before it got wet, tucked it under his shirt. When he glanced toward the horizon, Nadine Covington’s sailboat had become a firm white sliver beating its way south toward the horse latitudes.

CHAPTER EIGHT

In Which Our Hero Witnesses Some of the Many Surprising Effects of Nuclear War, Including Sundeath, Timefolds, and Unadmittance

‘I had a happy childhood,’ said George at the beginning of his first treatment session.

‘Happy childhoods are overrated,’ his therapist replied.

When George first met her, he had found Morning Valcourt vaguely attractive, but now he saw that the surgical mask she wore during their encounter in the radiation unit had been covering cheeks littered with scab-like freckles, a nose that seemed always to be experiencing a stench, and a mouth perpetually poised on the brink of a snarl. Yet Leonardo had given her a warm smile . . . obviously an artist of formidable imagination.

‘I’ll be honest,’ she said. ‘Survivor’s guilt threatens its victims with sudden mental collapse. To prevent this, we must tear certain facts from the shadowland of denial, thrusting them into the daylight of consciousness.’

Could this pompous woman really be Aubrey’s mother? When would the warm smiling start?

‘Any trouble sleeping lately?’ she asked.

‘I used to suffer from somnambulism. A couple of ensigns cured me of that.’

‘What ensigns?’

‘Peach and Cobb. They said they’ve always been with me, waiting to get in.’

‘But you’re sleeping through the night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Losing weight?’

‘No.’

‘Bowels okay?’

‘Fine.’ It would take considerable ambition to fall in love with this woman.

‘I’ve been prescribing a lot of sedatives lately,’ she said, ‘but in your case I’d rather not. They found you clutching a golden scopas suit.’

‘I got it from an inventor. Professor Theophilus Carter. He made me sign a sales contract.’

‘I know. A confession of complicity. I don’t approve of such things. Tell me what happened after you left Carter’s shop.’

George sucked air across his teeth, making the roots ache. He spoke of searing light and a mushroom cloud, of fires, wounds, black dust, and cries for water, of people needing burn wards that no longer existed. A desperate pause followed each image, so that the hour was nearly up by the time he got to the smashed Giant Ride horse. ‘She loved that stupid thing,’ he said. Scar tissue grew in his throat.