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George noticed that Reverend Sparrow appeared to be suffering from apoplexy.

‘Are we innately aggressive?’ asked Aquinas. ‘Was the nuclear predicament symptomatic of a more profound depravity? Nobody knows. But if this is so – and I suspect that it is – then the responsibility for what we are pleased to call our inhumanity still rests squarely in our blood-soaked hands. The killer-ape hypothesis does not specify a fate – it lays out an agenda. Beware, the fable warns. Caution. Trouble ahead. Genocidal weapons in the hands of creatures who are bored by peace.’

‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ said Brat.

‘But the fable went unheeded. And the weapons, unchecked. And then, one cold Christmas season, death came to an admirable species – a species that wrote symphonies and sired Leonardo da Vinci and would have gone to the stars. It did not have to be this way. Three virtues only were needed – creative diplomacy, technical ingenuity, and moral outrage. But the greatest of these is moral outrage.’

‘Self-righteous slop, you needed that too,’ said Brat.

‘You needed a trough of it,’ said Wengernook.

‘Shut up,’ said Overwhite.

‘For the past twenty days the walls of this sacred palace have enclosed a curious world,’ said Aquinas. ‘A world where peril is called security, destruction is called strategy, offense is called defense, enlightened self-interest is called appeasement, and machines of chaos and ecological horror are called weapons.’

‘And kangaroo courts are called tribunals,’ said Brat.

‘It is the world of Major General Roger Tarmac, the MARCH Hare, who believed that his Holy Triad meant salvation for America. In the name of the Bombers, and of the Subs, and of the Land-Based Missiles – Amen! It is the world of Brian Overwhite, the weapons industry’s favorite arms controller, who never in his entire career denied the Pentagon a system it really wanted. It is the world of William Randstable, the doomsday doctor, whose smart warhead was just one more bullet in the revolver with which humanity played, you should forgive the expression, Russian roulette. It is the world of Peter Sparrow, the Ezekiel of the airwaves, who wanted America to demonstrate her moral superiority over her adversary by becoming just like her adversary, adopting the economy and mentality of a garrison state. It is the world of Robert Wengernook, the auditor of acceptable losses, who forgot that a species as inquisitive as Homo sapiens cannot draw up plans for a war, even a war of extinction, without eventually needing to find out how well they work. And it is the world of George Paxton, citizen, perhaps the most guilty of all. Every night, this man went to bed knowing that the human race was pointing nuclear weapons at itself. Every morning, he woke up knowing that the weapons were still there. And yet he never took a single step to relieve the threat.’

Has Bonenfant’s team found that vulture expert? asked George’s spermatids. I don’t know, he told them.

‘Learned justices, you are about to write a verdict in the case. Your opinion will be the final chapter in human history. It will matter. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to speculate that, beyond our solar system, another intelligent species monitors this trial, seeking to learn what nuclear weapons are good for. And so I urge you to fill your pens with your black blood and tell these celestial eavesdroppers that the harvest of nuclear weapons is threefold – spiritual degeneration, self-delusion, and death. Perhaps we should bury your verdict in a capsule beneath the Antarctic ice, so that one day, a year or ten years or a century from now, some wayfarer in the Milky Way might find it and know that, for all our love of violence, at the final moment we were able to say no to fusion bombs and yes to life.’

‘Does he make up this crap himself?’ said Brat.

‘All the greeting card writers are dead,’ said Wengernook.

‘Shut up,’ said George.

‘While we cannot know for certain to whom your verdict will speak,’ said Aquinas, ‘we do know for whom it will speak. It will speak for the thousands who sit in this courtroom and for the multitudes who wait on the glacier. It will speak for history – for those who struggled to make this planet a repository of art and learning, and whose achievements have now been laid waste. And it will speak for a population who, in our self-pity as unadmitteds, we sometimes forget. I refer to the five billion men, women, and children who were blasted and burned alive, irradiated and crushed, suffocated and starved and sickened unto death in the recent holocaust.

‘Their blood cries to heaven, but their voice cannot be heard.

‘Give them a voice, your Honors. Give them a voice.’

AQUINAS DELIVERS ELEGY FOR HUMAN RACE, said Mount Christ-church that afternoon.

‘The tribunal will hear the closing argument of the defense,’ said Justice Jefferson.

George noticed how barren Bonenfant’s table had become – Dennie gone, Parkman gone, all of the papers gone save one.

‘Remember what he said on the boat,’ muttered Brat. ‘He’s got a rabbit or two in the hat.’

‘I’ll take two,’ said Wengernook.

‘A boy rabbit and a girl rabbit,’ said Randstable.

‘Honored justices,’ Bonenfant began, ‘I submit that, beyond the ornate pieties of my learned opponent, the issue you must decide is simple. Did these six men aim to wage a war or to preserve a peace? Their aim, we have seen, was peace. Indeed, no firmer fact has emerged from this long inquest.

‘Lest we forget, my clients did not ask to have thermonuclear weapons at their disposal. They did not want to inherit a world that knew these obscene devices. But inherit it they did, along with the threat to freedom posed by Russian Communism. I ask you, learned judges, would any of you have acted differently in their place?

‘We all know that the peace was not preserved. During this hearing the mechanism of peace-preservation – the policy of deterrence through strategic balance – has been characterized as self-defeating. In his cross-examination of Robert Wengernook, the prosecutor even went so far as to suggest that my clients pursued deterrence so vigorously that they forced the Soviet Union into the suicidal action of striking first – and with second-strike weapons, no less.

‘Now that is a most improbable scenario. Crazy. Fantastic. Weird… Indeed, it simply did not happen that way. I can prove as much.’

Gasps rushed through the courtroom like a thousand icy breezes. The Mount Christchurch reporters leaned over the balustrade of the press box.

‘At this point in the hearing it would be most peculiar were I to put anyone else on the stand. And yet, your Honors, that is what I now propose to do. For there is a seventh defendant in this case – a defendant who should have stood trial in place of my clients.’

The gasps faded into the rumble of the question What? in fifty languages.

‘Legal proceedings against animals have a long history. Plato’s The Laws includes the directive that “if a beast of burden shall kill anyone, the relatives of the deceased shall prosecute it for murder.” The Book of Exodus tells us that “when an ox gores a man to death, the ox must be stoned.” However, until today no one has indicted the animal that my assistants will now bring forward.’

A loud, high skreeee filled the courtroom – the shrill protestations of wheels turning on axles. Dennie and Parkman were pouring all of their youthful, unadmitted energy into pushing a large wooden cart toward the bench.