Hal, paralyzed and absorbed, watches Ingersoll bob on his haunches and shift his stick from hand to hand and cerebrate furiously and logically conclude, then, that IRLIBSYR’s highest possible strategic utility lies in AMNAT and SOVWAR failing to come to terms.
Hal can almost visualize a dark lightbulb going on above Ingersoll’s head. Pemulis is telling Penn that there’s a critical distinction between horning in and letting asswipes like Jeffrey Joseph Penn run roughshod over the delimiting boundaries that are Eschaton’s very life-blood. Chu and Peterson are nodding soberly at little things they’re saying to each other while Kittenplan cracks her knuckles and Possalthwaite bounces a warhead idly on his strings.
So now Evan Ingersoll rises from his squat now only to bend again and take a warhead out of IRLIBSYR’s ordnance-bucket, and Hal seems to be the only one who sees Ingersoll line up the vector very carefully with his slim thumb and take a lavish backswing and fire the ball directly at the little circle of super-Combatant leaders in West Africa. It’s not a lob. It flies straight as if shot from a rifle and strikes Ann Kittenplan right in the back of the head with a loud thock. She whirls to face east, a hand at the back of her bristly skull, scanning and then locking on Damascus, her face a stony Toltec death-mask.
Pemulis and Penn and Lord and everyone else all freeze, shocked and silent, so there’s just the weird glittered hiss of falling snow and the sounds of a couple crows interfacing in the pines over by HmH. The ATHSCME fans are silent, and four sweatsock-shaped clouds of exhaust hang motionless over the Sunstrand stacks. Nothing moves. No Eschaton Combatant has ever intentionally struck another Combatant’s physical person with a 5-megaton thermonuclear weapon. No matter how frayed players’ nerves, it’s never made a lick of sense. A Combatant’s megatonnage is too precious to waste on personal attacks outside the map. It’s been like this unspoken but very basic rule.
Ann Kittenplan is so shocked and enraged that she stands there transfixed, quivering, her sights locked on Ingersoll and his smoking Rossignol. Otis P. Lord feels at his beanie.
Ingersoll now makes a show of examining the tiny nails of his left hand and casually suggests that IRLIBSYR has just scored a direct 5-megaton contact-burst against SOVWAR’s entire launch capacity, namely Air Marshal Ann Kittenplan, and that plus also AMNAT’s own launch capacity, plus both Combatants’ ordnance and heads of state, all lie well within the blast’s kill-radius — which by Ingersoll’s rough calculations extends from the Ivory Coast to the doubles alley’s Senegal. Unless of course that kill-radius is somehow altered by the possible presence of climatic snow, he adds, beaming.
Pemulis and Kittenplan now each let loose with a linear series of anti-Ingersoll invectives that drown each other out and make the trees’ crows take slow flight.
But Otis Lord — who’s watched the exchange, ashen, and has called up something relevant on EndStat’s TREEMASTER metadecision subdirectory — now, to everyone’s horror, removes from around his neck a shoelace with a little nickel-colored key and bends to the small locked so-lander box on the food cart’s bottom shelf and as everyone watches in horror opens the box and with near-ceremonial care exchanges the white beanie on his head for the red beanie that signifies Utter Global Crisis. The dreaded red UGC beanie has been donned by an Eschaton game-master only once before, and that was over three years ago, when human input-error on EndStat tallies of aggregate SUFDDIR during a three-way SACPOP free-for-all yielded an apparent ignition of the earth’s atmosphere.
Now a real-world chill descends over the grainily white-swirled landscape of the nuclear theater.
Pemulis tells Lord he cannot believe his fucking eyes. He tells Lord how dare he don the dreaded red beanie over such an obvious instance of map-not-territory equivocationary horseshit as Ingersoll’s trying to foist.
Lord, bent to the cart’s blinking Yushityu, responds that there seems to be a problem.
Ingersoll is whistling and pretending to do the Charleston between Abu Kemal and Es Suweida, using his racquet like a hoofer’s cane.
Hal finally spits.
Under Pemulis’s wild-eyed stare, Lord clears his throat and calls out to Ingersoll, tentatively positing that today’s pre-game Triggering-Situation negotiations established no valid strategic target areas in the postage-stamp-sized nation of Sierra Leone.
Ingersoll calls back across the Mediterranean that target areas of keen strategic interest appeared in Sierra Leone at the exact moment the heads of state and total launch capacities of AMNAT and SOVWAR took it upon themselves to traipse into Sierra Leone. That Sierra Leone thenceforward as of that moment has, or rather had, he pretends to correct with a smile, become a de facto SSTRAC. If presidents and premiers wanted to leave the protection of their territories’ defense-nets and hold cliquey little other-Combatant-excluding parleys in some hut somewhere that was up to them, but Lord had been wearing the white beanie that explicitly authorized the overexploited and underdeveloped defenders of the One True Faith of the world to keep on pursuing their strategic interests, and IRLIBSYR was now keenly interested in the aggregate INDDIR-points it had coming to them for just now vaporizing both super-Combatants’ strategic capacities with one Flaming-Sword-of-The-Most-High-like strike.
Ann Kittenplan keeps taking a couple quivery steps toward Ingersoll and getting restrained and pulled back by LaMont Chu.
‘Sleepy T.P.’ Peterson, who always looks a little dazed even in the best of circumstances, asks Otis P. Lord to define equivocationary for him, causing Hal Incandenza to laugh out loud despite himself.
Just outside the theater’s fence, Pemulis is bug-eyed with fury — not impossibly ‘drine-aggravated — and is literally jumping up and down in one spot so hard that his yachting cap jumps slightly off his head with each impact, which Troeltsch and Axford confer and agree they have previously seen occur only in animated cartoons. Pemulis howls that Lord is in his vacillation appeasing Ingersoll in Ingersoll’s effort to fatally fuck with the very breath and bread of Eschaton.[130] Players themselves can’t be valid targets. Players aren’t inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game. They’re part of the map. It’s snowing on the players but not on the territory. They’re part of the map, not the cluster-fucking territory. You can only launch against the territory. Not against the map. It’s like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos. Eschaton gentlemen is about logic and axiom and mathematical probity and discipline and verity and order. You do not get points for hitting anybody real. Only the gear that maps what’s real. Pemulis keeps looking back over his shoulder to the pavilion and screaming ‘Jaysus!’