‘Whatever made them think that threatening to launch me into the ocean would scare me?’ The tomb inscriber laughed. His rescuer did not. George had never before met such a clean-shaven individual. It was as if all the man’s whisker follicles had been cauterized.
‘My grandfather was in the Navy,’ said the rescuer. His voice was like gourmet coffee, silky, layered. ‘Evidently it’s changed a lot since those days. These sailors have not received the Holy Spirit.’
George looked at his knuckles. They were speckled with a substance resembling tar. ‘Their blood is black.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said the rescuer.
‘You in the Navy, too?’
‘Ever watch Christian television?’
‘Not a great deal.’
‘Last year Countdown to God’s Wrath – you’ve never caught it? – we had a consistently better rating than Gospel Sing-Along. We get two and a half tons of mail a week. The Lord is doing so many wonderful things.’
‘My wife always wanted to be on television.’
The evangelist extended a soft, pliant hand. ‘Reverend Peter Sparrow,’ he said. Taking Sparrow’s hand, George felt sustenance and comfort radiate from each finger. This was a very fine evacuee indeed.
‘Television is becoming God’s chosen medium these days, just the way Gutenberg’s press used to be,’ said the evangelist. ‘We’ve been running a lot of old movies on Countdown lately, to build up our audience, follow what I’m saying? You’ve got to start where people are at. Sure, maybe Ben-Hur isn’t such a great picture – I mean, leprosy doesn’t really look like that, it’s quite a bit worse – but then you can move them toward the better stuff, The Robe and Quo Vadis and so on.’
George coughed. The torpedo tube had probably contained several infectious diseases. ‘So we’re all going to Antarctica.’
‘Isn’t it wonderful how nuclear exchanges cannot touch Christians?’ said Sparrow. ‘I knew the Perfect Exile would be a time of joy, but I hadn’t realized how rapturous the joy would be. I’m about to see my family.’
‘They’re in Antarctica?’
‘They’re in the sky with Jesus.’
George glanced up.
‘May I ask you something?’ The evangelist touched George’s spotted knuckles. ‘Are you saved?’
‘Yes, you just saved me. I’m most grateful to you. If your program was still on, I’d watch it.’
‘I’m talking about your relationship with—’
‘My family died when the Russians blew up Wildgrove. Or so I’m told.’
Reverend Sparrow frowned. ‘The Hebrew prophets – Ezekiel, Jeremiah – they’re all batting a thousand, understand? The Perfect Exile, the Terrible Trial, the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem – they saw everything, right? You’re saved, George, or you wouldn’t be on this trip.’
‘I’m a Unitarian.’
‘I’m going to pray for you,’ said Reverend Sparrow firmly.
‘I appreciate it,’ said George, and he did.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In the days that followed, George’s grief took on a New England quality, becoming not so much an emotion as a job to do.
He tried to remember all those times when fatherhood had seemed a crushing burden. Moments when Holly’s screeching or stubbornness had brought him to the brink of child beating, moments when he felt as if his life had been stolen and replaced by a talkative iron ball chained to his ankle. But only cloying memories came. Holly putting her dollies to bed. Trying to feed the sick cat before it died. Singing to herself. Struggling to grasp the point of a knock-knock joke. She had never understood that proper knock-knock jokes are puns. Knock-knock, she would say. Who’s there? a four-year-old friend would ask. Jennifer (or Suzy or Jeremiah or Alfred or Margaret), Holly would reply.
Jennifer who?
Jennifer Poopie Diapers Stupid Dumb Face!
And then she and her friend would dissolve in giggles, overwhelmed by preschool social satire.
Knock-knock.
‘Who’s there?’ George didn’t really need to ask. The knock was as characteristic as a fingerprint. ‘It’s open, Brat.’
The MARCH Hare pushed boisterously into the cabin – a one-man infantry charge. Accompanying him was a fiftyish man with a dark razoring stare and a marionette’s gangly frame.
‘Meet Dr William Randstable,’ said Brat. ‘The whiz kid of Sugar Brook Lab and, it is rumored, a certifiable genius.’ The general had lost some weight, and the bags under his eyes looked like change purses. ‘William, this is George Paxton – the poet laureate of Wildgrove, Massachusetts.’
‘I’m not really a whiz kid any more,’ said Randstable. His suit was several sizes too large. ‘More of a whiz middle-aged man.’
‘I hear you once beat the Russian chess champion,’ said George.
‘I made the next-to-the-last mistake,’ said Randstable modestly.
Brat patted his man-portable thermonuclear device. ‘Well, men, looks as if some more fat is about to enter the fire.’ His words fought past a trembling throat and clenched teeth. ‘They’re planning to knock over the remaining enemy missile fields at fourteen hundred hours. If we hurry to the launch control room, we can catch thirty-six Multiprongs go galloping off like Grant took Richmond.’
‘Sugar Brook did the technical support for Multiprong guidance and control,’ said Randstable with a quick chuckle. He removed his horn-rimmed eyeglasses and began chewing on the ear piece. ‘I always wondered how I’d feel on the day they actually left the nest.’
‘Pretty upset, I guess,’ said George. An understatement, he concluded from what came out of Randstable’s chest, a conglomeration of sighs and uncontrolled wheezing.
After moving down a narrow passageway crowded with pipes, ducts, ladders, and stopcocks, the three evacuees came upon a hatch labeled RECREATION AREA: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Brat decided they were authorized personnel. Crossing over, they entered a throbbing undersea metropolis, each facility scaled to the constraints of submarine space. They started along a corridor named Entertainment Lane. George noted a compact skating rink, a slightly abbreviated bowling alley, a miniature golf course where every hazard entailed placing the ball in one orifice or other of a plaster mermaid, and a pair of succinct indoor swimming pools. The enlisted men’s pool was eight feet deep, the officers’ ten. A waking nightmare seized George – Peach and Cobb wrapping his body in chains and throwing him into the officers’ pool. Or perhaps they would favor the bowling alley. They would tie him up and leave him behind the pins.
A movie marquee blazed outside a small theater. SERGEI BONDARCHUK’S ‘WAR AND PEACE,’ the marquee shouted. Several blue-suited sailors were lined up at the box office; Peach and Cobb were not among them. Opposite the theater, the little Silver Dollar Casino dazzled George with its hurlyburly of lights and its promises of instant fortune. Through the swinging doors he noticed a seaman second-class dealing blackjack. The clacks and gongs of slot machines ricocheted into the corridor.
Passing through a bulkhead labeled DETERRENCE AREA: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, the evacuees found themselves before an open doorway to the missile compartment. Enlisted men streamed back and forth. Brat accosted the first officer he could find, a freckle-faced lieutenant named Grass.
‘Mister Grass, I thought you were due to launch at fourteen hundred hours.’
The young officer neglected to return Brat’s salute. ‘The reentry vehicles aren’t ready,’ he said.