So the word came that it was all right for him to let the thing go.
So he let the thing go.
His friend on the ground asked him what it felt like to give something like that its freedom. He replied that he had at last found something which was more fun than sexual intercourse.
The young colonel's feelings at the moment of release had to be transcendental, had to be entirely products of that big brain of his, since the plane did not shudder or yaw or suddenly climb or dive when the rocket departed to consummate its love affair. It continued on exactly as before, with the automatic pilot compensating instantly for the sudden change in the plane's weight and aerodynamics.
As for effects of the release visible to Reyes: The rocket was much too high to leave a vapor trail, and its exhaust was clean, so that, to Reyes, it was a rod which quickly shrank to a dot and then to a speck and then to nothingness. It vanished so quickly that it was hard to believe that it had ever existed.
And that was that.
The only residue of the event in the stratosphere had to be in Reyes's big brain or nowhere. He was happy. He was humble. He was awed. He was drained.
*
Reyes wasn't crazy to feel that what he had done was analogous to the performance of a male during sexual intercourse. A computer over which he had no control, once he had turned it on, had determined the exact moment of release, and had delivered detailed instructions to the release machinery without any need of advice from him. He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.
The launching of the missile, in fact, was virtually identical with the role of male animals in the reproductive process.
Here was what the colonel could be counted on to do: deliver the goods in an instant.
Yes--and that rod which became a dot and then a speck and then nothingness so quickly was somebody else's responsibility now. All the action from now on would be on the receiving end.
He had done his part. He was sweetly sleepy now--and amused and proud.
And I worry now about skewing my story, since a few characters in it were genuinely insane, and giving the impression that everybody a million years ago was insane. That was not the case. I repeat: that was not the case.
Almost everybody was sane back then, and I gladly award Reyes that widespread encomium. The big problem, again, wasn't insanity, but that people's brains were much too big and untruthful to be practical.
No single human being could claim credit for that rocket, which was going to work so perfectly. It was the collective achievement of all who had ever put their big brains to work on the problem of how to capture and compress the diffuse violence of which nature was capable, and drop it in relatively small packages on their enemies.
I myself had had some highly personal experiences with dreams-come-true of that sort in Vietnam--which is to say, with mortars and hand grenades and artillery. Nature could never have been that predictably destructive in such small spaces without the help of humankind.
I have already told my story about the old woman I shot for throwing a hand grenade. There are plenty of others I could tell, but no explosion I saw or heard about in Vietnam could compare with what happened when that Peruvian rocket put the tip of its nose, that part of its body most richly supplied with exposed nerve endings, into that Ecuadorian radar dish.
No one is interested in sculpture these days. Who could handle a chisel or a welding torch with their flippers or their mouths?
If there were a monument out here in the islands, though, celebrating a key event in the past, that would be a good one: the moment of mating, right before the explosion, between that rocket and that radar dish.
Into the lava plinth beneath it these words might be incised, expressing the sentiments of all who had had a hand in the design and manufacture and sale and purchase and launch of the rocket, and of all to whom high explosives were a branch of the entertainment industry:
... 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)
35
TWENTY MINUTES before the rocket gave that French kiss to the radar dish, Captain Adolf von Kleist concluded that it was now safe for him to come down from the crow's nest of the Bahia de Darwin. The ship had been picked clean, and had fewer amenities and navigational aids, even, than had Her Majesty's Ship Beagle when that brave little wooden sailboat began her voyage around the world on December 27, 1831. The Beagle had had a compass, at least, and a sextant, and navigators who could imagine with considerable accuracy the position of their ship in the clockwork of the universe because of their knowledge of the stars. And the Beagle, moreover, had had oil lanterns and candles for the nighttime, and hammocks for the seamen, and mattresses and pillows for the officers. Anyone determined to spend the night on the Bahia de Darwin now would have to rest his or her weary head on nude steel, or perhaps do what Hisako Hiroguchi would do when she couldn't keep her eyes open any longer. Hisako would sit on the lid of the toilet off the main saloon, and lay her head on her arms, which were folded atop the washbasin in there.
*
I have likened the mob at the hotel to a tidal wave, whose crest swept past the bus, never to return again. I would say that the mob at the waterfront was more like a tornado. Now that ferocious whirlwind was moving inland in the twilight, and feeding on itself, since its members had themselves become worth robbing--carrying lobsters and wine and electronic gear and drapes and coat hangers and cigarettes and chairs and rolls of carpeting and towels and bedspreads, and on and on.
So the Captain clambered down from the crow's nest. The rungs bruised his bare and tender feet. He had the ship and the entire waterfront all to himself, as far as he could see. He went to his cabin first, since he was wearing only his undershorts. He hoped that the looters had left him a little something to wear. When he turned on the light switch in there, though, nothing happened--because all the light bulbs were gone.
There was electricity, anyway--since the ship still had her banks of storage batteries down in the engine room. The thing was: The light-bulb thieves had blacked out the engine room before the batteries and generators and starter motors could be stolen. So, in a sense, they had unwittingly done humanity a big favor. Thanks to them, the ship would still run. Without her navigational aids, she was as blind as Selena MacIntosh--but she was still the fastest ship in that part of the world, and she could slice water at top speed for twenty days without refueling, if necessary, provided nothing went wrong in the pitch-dark engine room.
As things would turn out, though: After only five days at sea, something would go very much wrong in the pitch-dark engine room.
The Captain certainly had no plans for putting out to sea as he groped about his cabin for more clothes to hide his nakedness. There wasn't even a handkerchief or a washcloth in there. Thus was he having his first taste of a textile shortage, which at the moment seemed merely inconvenient, but which would be acute during the thirty years of life still ahead of him. Cloth to protect his skin from sunburn in the daytime and from chills at night simply would not be available anymore. How he and the rest of the first colonists would come to envy Hisako's daughter Akiko for her coat of fur!
Everybody but Akiko, until Akiko herself had furry babies, would in the daytime have to wear fragile capes and hats made of feathers tied together with fish guts.
Quoth Mandarax to the contrary:
Man is a biped without feathers.
--PLATO (427?-347 B.C.)
The Captain remained calm as he searched his cabin. The shower in the head was dripping, and he turned it off tight. That much he could make right, anyway. That was how composed he was. As I have already said, his digestive system still had food to process. Even more important to his peace of mind, though, was that nobody was counting on him for anything. Those who had looted the ship almost all had numerous relatives in
dire need, who were starting to roll their eyes and pat their bellies and point down their throats like the Kanka-bono girls.
The Captain was still in possession of his famous sense of humor, and freer than ever to indulge it. For whose sake was he now to pretend that life was a serious matter? There weren't even rats left on the ship. There had never been rats on the Bahia de Darwin, which was another lucky break for humankind. If rats had come ashore with the first human settlers on Santa Rosalia, there would have been nothing left for people to eat in six months or so.
And then, after that, the rats, after having eaten what was left of the people and each other, would themselves have died.
Quoth Mandarax:
Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women's chats By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.
--ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889)
The Captain's clever fingers, working in the blacked-out head, now encountered what would prove to be half a bottle of cognac sitting atop the tank of his toilet. This was the last bottle of any sort still aboard the ship, and its contents were the last substance to be found, from stem to stern and from crow's nest to keel, which a human being could metabolize. In saying that, of course, I exclude the possibility of cannibalism. I ignore the fact that the Captain himself was quite edible.
And just as the Captain's fingers got a firm grip on the bottle's neck in the darkness, something big and strong outside gave the Bahia de Darwin an authoritative bump. Also: There were male voices from the boat deck, one deck below. The thing was: The tugboat crew which had delivered fuel and food to the Colombian freighter San Mateo was now preparing to haul away the Bahia de Darwin's two lifeboats. They had cast off the ship's bowline, and the tug was nosing her bow into the estuary, so that the lifeboat on her starboard side could be lowered into the water.
So that the ship was now married to the South American mainland by a single line at her stern. Poetically speaking, that stern line is the white nylon umbilical cord of all modern humankind.
*
The Captain might as well have been my fellow ghost on the Bahia de Darwin. The men who took our lifeboats never even suspected that there was another soul aboard.
All alone again, except for me, he proceeded to get drunk. What could that matter now? The tugboat, with the lifeboats following obediently, had disappeared upstream. The San Mateo, all lit up like a Christmas tree, and with the radar dish atop her bridge revolving, had disappeared downstream, so that the Captain felt free to shout whatever he pleased from the bridge without attracting unfavorable attention. His hands on the ship's wheel, he called into the starlit evening, "Man overboard!" He was speaking of himself.
Expecting nothing to happen, he pressed the starter button for the port engine. From the bowels of the ship came the muffled, deep-purple rumble of a great diesel engine in perfect health. He pressed the other starter button, giving the gift of life to the engine's identical twin. These dependable, uncomplaining slaves had been born in Columbus, Indiana--not far from Indiana University, where Mary Hepburn had taken her master's degree in zoology.
Small world.
That the diesels still worked was to the Captain simply one more reason to make himself wild and stupid with cognac. He switched off the engines, and it was a good thing he did. If he had let them run long enough to get really hot, that temperature anomaly might have attracted the electronic attention of a Peruvian fighter-bomber in the stratosphere. In Vietnam, we had heat-sensing instruments so sensitive that could actually detect the presence of people, or at least big mammals of some kind, in the night--because their bodies were just a little bit warmer than their surroundings.
One time I called in an artillery barrage on a water buffalo. Usually it was people out there--trying to sneak up on us and kill us, if they could. What a life! I would have loved to put down all my weapons and become a fisherman instead.
And that was the sort of thing the Captain was thinking up there on the bridge: "What a life!" and so on. It was all very funny, except he didn't feel like laughing. He thought that life had now taken his measure, had found him not worth much of anything, and was now through with him. Little did he know!
He went out on the sun deck, which was aft of the bridge and the officers' cabins, his bare feet on bare steel. Now that the sun deck had been stripped of its carpeting, the plugged holes which were supposed to receive the mounts for weapons were plainly visible, even in starlight. I myself had welded four of the plates on the sun deck. Most of my work, and my finest work, however, was deep inside.
The Captain looked up at the stars, and his big brain told him that his planet was an insignificant speck of dust in the cosmos, and that he was a germ on that speck, and that nothing could matter less than what became of him. That was what those big brains used to do with their excess capacity: blather on like that. To what purpose? You won't catch anybody thinking thoughts like that today.
So then he saw a shooting star--a meteorite burning up on the edge of the atmosphere, up where Lieutenant Colonel Reyes in his space suit had just received word that Peru was officially at war with Ecuador. The shooting star cued the Captain's big brain to have him marvel yet again about how unprepared people were for meteorites striking the Earth's surface.
And then there was this tremendous explosion out at the airport, as the rocket and the radar dish honeymooned.
The hotel bus, all painted up outside with the blue-footed boobies and marine iguanas and penguins and flightless cormorants and so on, was at that moment parked in front of a hospital. The Captain's brother Siegfried was about to go inside to get help for James Wait, who had lost consciousness. *Wait's heart attack had necessitated this detour on the way to the airport, which had surely saved the lives of all on board.
The great bubble of the shock wave from that explosion was as dense as bricks. To those on the bus, it seemed that hospital itself had exploded. The windows and windshield of the bus were blown inward, but turned out to have been shatterproof. They had not turned to shrapnel. Mary and Hisako and Selena and *Kazakh and poor *Wait and the Kanka-bono girls and the Captain's brother were pelted with seeming kernels of white corn instead.
This would happen on the Bahia de Darwin as well. The windows would all be blown in, and white kernels would be underfoot everywhere.
The hospital, so full of light only moments before, was blacked out now, as was the whole city, and there were cries for help coming from inside. The engine of the bus was still running, thank God, and its headlights illuminated a narrow pathway through the debris up ahead. So *Siegfried, becoming more palsied by the second, still managed to drive away from there. What help could he or anybody else on the bus be to the survivors, if any, in the blasted hospital?
And the logic of the maze of rubble directed the creeping bus away from the center of the explosion, the airport, and toward the waterfront. The road across the marsh from the edge of the city to the deepwater wharves was in fact almost clear of wreckage, there was so little for the shock wave to knock down out there.
*
*Siegfried von Kleist drove to the waterfront because it was the path of least resistance. Only he could see where they were going. The others were still on the floor of the bus. Mary Hepburn had dragged the unconscious James Wait away from the Kanka-bono girls, so that he was lying flat on his back now, with her lap for a pillow. The big brains of the Kanka-bonos had shut down entirely, for want of even a wisp of a theory as to what was going on. Hisako Hiroguchi and Selena MacIntosh and Kazakh were similarly immobilized.
And everybody was deaf, since the shock wave had done
such violence to the bones in their inner ears, the tiniest bones in their bodies. Nor would any of them recover their sense of hearing entirely. With the exception of the Captain, the first colonists on Santa Rosalia would all be slightly deaf, so that a good deal of their conversations would consist, in one language or another, of "Eh?" and "Speak up" and so on.
This defect, fortunately, was not inheritable.
Like Andrew MacIntosh and Zenji Hiroguchi, they would never find out what hit them--unless there were answers to questions like that at the far end of the blue tunnel into the Afterlife. They would accept the Captain's theory that the explosion and another explosion still to come had been the impacts of white-hot boulders from outer space--but not wholeheartedly, since the Captain would prove to be laughably mistaken about so many things.
The Captain's palsied younger brother, his ears ringing, some of his hearing returning, stopped the bus on the wharf near the Bahia de Darwin. He had not expected her to be a haven. He was unsurprised to find her dark and apparently deserted, with her windows blown in, her lifeboats missing, and barely secured to the wharf by a single line at her stern. Her freed bow was some distance from the wharf, so that her gangplank dangled over water.
She had of course been looted, like the hotel. The wharf was littered with wrappings and cartons and other trash discarded by the scavengers.
*Siegfried did not expect to see his brother. He had heard that the Captain had left New York, but not that he had actually reached Guayaquil. If the Captain was somewhere in Guayaquil, he was very likely dead or injured, or, in any case, in no position to be of much help to anyone. Nobody in Guayaquil at that point in history was in a position to be of much help to anyone else.
Quoth Mandarax:
Help yourself, and heaven will help you.