This is the Way the World Ends (23 page)

At the translator’s table a small army of darkbloods leaned toward an array of battery-powered microphones appropriated from the submarine and rendered the judge’s decree into fifty languages.

George glanced at the prosecution table. Alexander Aquinas’s staff tormented the tomb inscriber with their manifest maturity. Like a hot air balloon cut free of its moorings, a rotund deputy prosecutor gradually left her chair, indictment at the ready. She attempted no theatrics, just smooth inflections, clean, clear, even a bit diffident.

THE UNADMITTED PEOPLES OF ANTARCTICA

– AGAINST –

ROBERT WENGERNOOK, BRIAN OVERWHITE, MAJOR GENERAL ROGER TARMAC, DR WILLIAM RANDSTABLE, REVEREND PETER SPARROW, GEORGE PAXTON, individually and as members of the following groups and organizations to which they respectively belonged, namely:

The United States Department of Defense, The United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, The United States Air Force, The Strategic Air Command, The National Security Council, Lumen Corporation, Sugar Brook National Laboratory, The Committee on the Incipient Evil.

Defendants.

THE UNADMITTED PEOPLES OF ANTARCTICA, by the undersigned Alexander Aquinas and staff, duly appointed to represent them in the investigation of the charges herein set forth, pursuant to the McMurdo Sound Agreement and the Charter of this Tribunal, DO ACCUSE THE ABOVE-NAMED DEFENDANTS of the following crimes.

Count One. Crimes Against Peace:
planning and preparing for a war of aggression, whether or not in violation of the domestic laws of a defendant’s country of citizenship.

Count Two. War Crimes:
deploying weapons explicitly designed for the wanton destruction of cities, for the slaughter of civilian populations, and for other violations of the laws and customs of war.

Count Three. Crimes Against Humanity:
namely, biosphere mutilation, radiation poisoning, superfluous injury, unnecessary suffering, and other cruel and barbaric acts.

Count Four. Crimes Against the Future:
namely, planning and preparing for a war of extinction against the human species.

‘None of that is true,’ George whispered toward his new spermatids. A vulture expert. Everything would be fine as long as the defense could locate a vulture expert.

‘The tribunal will arraign the defendants,’ said Justice Wojciechowski. ‘Robert Wengernook, will you please come before the bench?’

Locking his face in a sneer, the assistant defense secretary did as instructed.

‘How do you plead to the charges and specifications set forth in the indictment against you – guilty or not guilty?’

‘Not guilty in the sense of the indictment,’ asserted Wengernook with a credibility George feared he would be unable to match.

So it went, down the line. Only Reverend Sparrow departed from the script, asserting that he was ‘a sinful man, guilty as Adam and Eve, but soon to be redeemed by the Son of Man.’

‘A plea of “not guilty” will be entered,’ said Justice Wojciechowski. ‘George Paxton, will you please come before the bench?’

Ten thousand unadmitted eyes drilled into George as he left the booth and walked across the courtroom.

‘How do you plead to the charges and specifications set forth in the indictment against you – guilty or not guilty?’

‘Not guilty in the sense of the indictment.’ The vaulted ceiling replayed his words, filling his ears with the oddly-timbred, public version of his voice.

There was a flurry of activity at the defense table. Martin Bonenfant, looking younger than ever, leaped up. ‘Your Honors, at this juncture we are compelled to challenge the competence of the tribunal.’ He waved a document in quick little spirals. ‘We request that you accept our petition to have this case immediately severed.’ Marching forward, he slapped the document on the frozen bench.

‘On what grounds?’ asked Justice Jefferson.

‘We submit that the deterrence measures specified in the McMurdo Sound Agreement were not recognized as crimes under any statutes, national or international, passed prior to the war. Hence, this tribunal violates the most fundamental principle of justice –
nullum crimen sine lege previa
, no crime without preexisting law. It is an
ex post facto
instrument, organized solely to convict. The six men in the dock are not defendants, they are scapegoats. We further submit that, because your Honors are yourselves unadmitted, you are not qualified to pass judgment on men for whom that race bears an instinctual hatred.’

The president of the court smiled, and the effect was of someone flipping back the dust cover on a piano. She removed her whalebone-framed glasses. ‘If you have truly forgotten the legal traditions underlying the trial, Mr Bonenfant, then I commend to your attention the document from which our indictment takes its wording – namely the 1945 London Agreement empowering an international court to prosecute Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg, Germany. As for your second argument, I concede that the loss of the human race stirs every judge on this bench, and that the evidence is likely to arouse our abhorrence. But our professional duty is to restrain such feelings, listening with an impartial ear, and this duty we shall honor.’ Justice Jefferson tapped her glasses against the icy bench. ‘Petition for severance denied,’ she announced in a tone suggesting that, in her canceled life, she had denied many a severance petition.

‘The same to your cat, Judge,’ muttered Brat.

‘All they want is an explanation,’ said Overwhite.

‘All they want is our ass,’ said Wengernook.

‘The prosecution will make its opening address,’ declared Justice Jefferson.

When Alexander Aquinas stood up, George saw that the forces arrayed against them were formidable indeed. The chief prosecutor was well over six feet tall. His head looked like a sculpture of itself – rough-hewn, bleak, larger than life. His shaggy gray hair and thick neck suggested that he owned lion genes. Slowly he walked to the bench, turned, and stared toward the gallery with the intensity of a man having a private audience with an angel. He smiled.

‘That this is the most important legal proceeding of all time cannot be doubted. The great precedents – Jerusalem and the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Nuremberg and the trial of Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, and others – will in the early days guide us like beacons set along a storm-lashed shore, but then we must head for open sea, with only our remembered humanity to guide us.’

‘He thinks like a girl,’ said Brat.

‘Shut up,’ said Overwhite.

‘It is a strange proceeding,’ continued Aquinas. ‘It is both a war crimes trial and a peace crimes trial, with the peace crimes perhaps being more damnable – certainly more incomprehensible – than the war crimes.’ Spinning around, he fired a long, accusing finger toward the glass booth. His eyes trembled in his great skull like poached eggs. ‘For these men
knew
what the fusion bomb could do. They
knew
that deterrence through terror, which they misnamed “defense,” could not last forever. Indeed, they were often among the loudest, though rarely among the most eloquent, critics of the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.’

George reminded his spermatids that he and his five friends were innocent.

‘And yet, in place of mutual assured destruction, they offered nothing. No – worse than nothing. They offered their infatuation with nuclear weapons – an infatuation they expressed in elaborate plans for winning nuclear wars . . . even if winning meant, and I quote from a speech by the defendant Wengernook, “that no enemy are left alive, but two Americans, male and female, have survived to start the race up again.” ’

‘Can’t you use a goddamn metaphor any more without being dragged into court?’ asked Wengernook.

‘Do you really think one man and woman could start everything up again?’ asked George.

‘Of course,’ said Wengernook. ‘Assuming they got along.’

A calculated rage was building in Aquinas. ‘And the people said, “You must not do this!” And the defendants said, “You cannot stop us!”

‘And the people said, “We want to live!” And the defendants said, “The weapons are here to stay!”

‘And the people said, “We want grandchildren!” And the defendants said, “Don’t be so idealistic!” ’

A gallows grew in George’s mind, the blood-sculpture that Sverre’s navy had fashioned at the celebration banquet. His dark, wet body dripped from the noose. He wondered what it was like to hang. He imagined himself at the moment of release, reaching up, grabbing the rope, hoisting himself back to life with a great muscled arm . . .

‘The fusion bomb was a costly mistress. Consider, your Honors. In 1979 this planet celebrated the International Year of the Child. Of the one hundred and twenty-two million children born that year, one of every ten was dead by 1982, and most died for lack of inexpensive food and vaccines. Yet in 1982 the world spent one trillion dollars on weapons.
One trillion dollars!
’

George’s arm slipped. The noose tightened.

‘Lays it on with a trowel,’ said Brat.

‘Two trowels,’ said Wengernook.

‘Let us jump ahead,’ said Aquinas. ‘In the year of the holocaust, the price of one new missile-carrying submarine equaled the combined education budgets of twenty-three developing countries . . .’

For the next half-hour the chief prosecutor reeled off similar statistics, most of them including the word ‘children.’

‘Nuclear weapons were the
cheap
defense,’ Wengernook explained to his co-defendants. ‘Can’t anybody get that straight?’

When Aquinas went back to his table, an associate prosecutor gave him hot cocoa while a deputy prosecutor delivered a computer printout.

‘At 7:34 on a Saturday morning,’ said Aquinas, ‘Eastern Standard Time, early warning systems detected the launch of ten Spitball cruise missiles from Soviet long-range manned bombers in a holding pattern near the Arctic Circle. NORAD computers inside Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, calculated the missiles’ trajectories, naming Washington, DC, as their target and giving 9:06 as the estimated time of detonation. A preemptive strike was evidently under way, with decapitation of the American command-and-control infrastructure as its primary objective.’

Aquinas presented the printout to Justice Jefferson, who put on her whalebone glasses and studied it with morbid curiosity.

‘At 7:40 all strategic forces were placed on full alert,’ the chief prosecutor continued. ‘At 7:52 satellite views confirmed that the detection was not due to an anomalous phenomenon. At 8:07 the NORAD computers and the SAC computers began debating their options. At 8:08 the debate ended when the computers voted to recommend anticipatory retaliation against Soviet ICBM fields as per the MARCH Plan. At 8:25 the President was taken from the White House by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base, where he was subsequently spirited away by an airborne command post and never heard from again . . .

‘And so the world went to thermonuclear war. First strike, second strike, third, fourth. Keep it clean. Keep it surgical. Go for the other side’s war-waging capability, that’s all.’ Aquinas gave a small, quick smile. ‘Ah, but what if that war-waging capability embraces civilian population centers? There is a breezy little term for this particular brand of nuclear strategy. The term, learned judges, is city-busting.’ He hurled his mug across the courtroom, cocoa trailing behind like rocket exhaust. ‘But wait!’ he screamed as the mug shattered. ‘Could not the leaders of the superpowers see that they were dragging the human species into extinction? Of course they could. The leaders of the superpowers, however, were not beholden to the human species, but only to their respective sovereign states. How were they to explain the loss of so much for
nothing?
The destruction of a few cities was not a reason to quit, it was a reason to
risk the rest
.’

Returning to the prosecution table, Aquinas picked up a copy of the McMurdo Sound Agreement.

‘Thus were the Major Attack Options implemented,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Thus did the world follow the maps of hell so diligently drawn by Robert Wengernook, Brian Overwhite, Major General Roger Tarmac, Dr William Randstable, Reverend Peter Sparrow, and George Paxton.’

The prosecutor caressed the barbed-wire binding of the agreement. A pearl of black blood appeared on his index finger. He moved the finger across the cover, drawing an X in blood.

‘If faced with the unenviable task of defending these six men, I would perhaps argue that they had no choice. Their adversary was piling weapon upon weapon, and their only option was to do likewise. But that is a false argument. It
was
possible to rid the planet of the nuclear threat. Not by organizing a world government or bringing heaven to earth, but by diplomatic measures fully within the defendants’ knowledge and capabilities. As the case for the prosecution unfolds, you judges will learn exactly what this solution was. The gravamen of the charges against these men lies in their deliberate refusal to consider it. In short, the prosecution is prepared to prove criminal negligence on a scale the world has never seen before – and will never see again!’

Aquinas sat down and accepted handshakes from his assistants.

Although George’s worst fear – that the courtroom would erupt in thunderous applause – was not realized, he did see smiles lighting the faces of almost everyone in the gallery. Many spectators, including several of the Mount Christchurch reporters, pantomimed the act of clapping. A young woman, manifestly gripped by a variety of romantic fantasies involving Aquinas, trembled and wept.

‘This guy’s full of yams,’ said Brat.