Aboard the U.S. Wartoy, as the American missile neared the midway point of its electronically computed trip, Professor Von Schweindrek recited Nietzche to himself. A clenched fist drumming on the control panel provided punctuation. Of course, Professor Von Schweindrek’s fist never really made contact with the White button. Nevertheless, to him, in future Zarathustra spake with forked tongue.
The cymbals resounded, Superman cracked his whip, and both subs were sent into a spin by an unexpected nuclear explosion half as far away and twice as powerful as the ones anticipated. Equipment and men bounced off the walls of both undersea vessels. Halfway around the world, off the coast of Japan, a fisherman picked himself up off the deck of his ship and sat down to write a letter of protest to the UN.
“Oops!” Professor Von Schweindrek said.
“Oops!” Admiral Churkov unknowingly echoed.
Both men assumed that their respective hands must have slipped. But each soon saw that this was not the case. The white button had not been depressed. The sickle-shaped lever had not been tripped.
Concurrent with these realizations of innocence came two sputtering voices. One, heard aboard the Wartoy, originated at the home base of Project Blowjob at Point Barrow, Alaska. The other, communicating to the Glubtub, was transmitted from the Operation Fartnik computer center at Ambarchik, Siberia. Both, in essence, conveyed the same message:
“Klutz! Too soon! You weren’t supposed to detonate until—”
Both men protested their innocence with outsized vehemence. Von Schweindrek justified himself all the way back to the days of the first putsch. Admiral Churkov reminded Control of his fidelity to the party, tracing it back to the day in 1937 when he’d reported his own sister to the authorities for listening to a smuggled recording of Guy Lombardo.
By the time they’d finished, the situation aboard both submarines was stable enough to raise the observation and recording equipment. Professor Von Schweindrek pressed the blue button. Admiral Churkov rotated the globular switch. Both men crunched their monocles in their eagerness to peer through the telescopic periscopes.
Neither saw very much. Both subs were still too far away. And it would be a while before the point of nuclear explosion could be approached with any degree of safety. In the interim, both Point Barrow and Ambarchik raised the same nagging questions:
“Wha’ hoppen? If you didn’t detonate the missile, why did it go off?”
To which Professor Von Schweindrek could only reply: “Eine grosse ober-goof! Hell, that’s why they put erasers . . .”
And Admiral Churkov could only answer: “Nyet guilty! But there was a phumph somewhere along the line, so— Back to the old . . .”
Finally, both submarines, following the course of their respective missiles, were able to get close enough to the point of impact to observe the results. In some respects these early observations all agree. Cameras and eyes confirmed the presence of the largest mushroom cloud recorded to date. Russians and Americans agreed that it was twice as large as the one anticipated. Piercing the vapor, both parties detected a small iceberg at about the center of the stem of the mushroom where it sprouted from the Arctic waters. Both simultaneously noted the blip of what later turned out to be an enemy submarine on their radarscopes. Up to that point there was general agreement among all the observers, mechanical and human.
Then Jonathan Relevant appeared and each eye blazed its own optic trail!
In the forward section of the U.S. Wartoy, Lieutenant j.g. Crispus was peering through the telescope when Jonathan Relevant manifested himself. Lieutenant Crispus, who had been the only black man in his graduating class at Annapolis, was a naval intelligence officer assigned to the Wartoy as an observer. He’d been well-trained for the job, and he prided himself on doing it well. Now he relayed his observations to the captain over the intercom:
“Reporting appearance of man at distance of approximately six hundred yards atop iceberg, sir.”
“Observation acknowledged. Provide more detailed description.”
“Details as follows: Male. Negro. Nude. About six feet tall, one-hundred-eighty pounds. Twenty-five to thirty-five years of age. Military bearing . . .”
“Mister Crispus!” the captain bellowed. “Do you have that periscope reversed so you’re looking in the mirror?”
“Negative. And might I be permitted to remind the captain that subject is naked, while I am wearing regulation uniform.”
“Mister Crispus! What would a naked black man be doing standing on an iceberg in the middle of the Arctic Ocean?”
“What would a naked white man be doing standing on an iceberg in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, sir?”
While the captain pondered that question, in the compartment below him, amidships on the Wartoy, Professor Von Schweindrek was tape-recording his first impression of Jonathan Relevant: “Blonde, blue-eyed, Aryan, un-circumcised. Dueling scar on right cheek. Prussian demeanor . . .”
On the other side of the iceberg, in the rear section of the U.S.S.R Glublub, was the only female aboard either vessel, Dr. Ludmilla Skivar. The young Soviet biologist was renowned for her scientifically revolutionary treatise entitled A Pavlovian Interpretation of the Salivary Glands as Reactive Sensory Mechanisms in the Pre-Coital Stages of Human Reproduction and the Subsequent Effects Related to the Malthusian Theory of Progressively Increasing World Population—-familiarly referred to in scientific circles as The Skivar Spit, Sex and Rabbit Theory.
Even in her shapeless coveralls, Ludmilla Skivar didn’t fit the image of the Nobel Prize contender she was. The thrust of her mammaries was too impudent for them to be dismissed as mere encasements for lungs. Her pelvic structure, enticingly prominent at the juncture of her pants legs, was of more than clinically osteopathic interest. Indeed, her skeletal structure as a whole was fleshed in such a way as to turn the most dedicated of her anatomy students from textbook nomenclature to more idiomatic exclamations of appreciation.
But it was her face, with its osculatable O of a mouth, high cheekbones, round, dimpled chin, and hoydenish topping of tousled, curly black hair, which really made Dr. Skivar appear more frivolous than was becoming to a dedicated Soviet scientist. Only the deep green eyes asked biological questions. And perhaps they asked them a bit too directly to uphold scientific detachment.
Now one of those eyes peered through the periscope at Jonathan Relevant. “Tall,” Dr. Skivar noted. (She was a tall girl herself, but he had at least four inches on her; even if she wore heels, he’d be tall enough.) “Dark.” (His tightly curled black hair and rugged swarthiness was reminiscent of Yuri Gagarin.) “Handsome.” (The strong build of a Russian peasant, but with the intensity and intelligence in his face of the poet Yevtushenko; Dr. Skivar sighed.)
“Male. Naked. Male!” (The genital development was truly remarkable, truly remarkable! Nor was it merely due to the tumescent state—doubtless an automatic reflex to the sub-freezing temperature—of his primary reproductive organ.)
“Male. Naked. Masculine. Nude. Tumescent . . .” Dr. Ludmilla Skivar blinked one green eye and then peered into the eyepiece of the periscope again to confirm her observation.
Meanwhile, in the control room of the Glubtub, Admiral Churkov was also observing Jonathan Relevant through a periscope. A smile of nostalgia crossed the admiral’s lips. The naked man on the iceberg looked amazingly like the admiral’s dead father. Admiral Churkov had loved and admired his father more than any other man he had ever known. Self-educated, first a downtrodden streetcleaner in the service of the czar, and then a fiery revolutionary waving the banner of Lenin, the admiral’s father had spent his last days as a functionary in the Moscow Sanitation Department, a man grown a little too soft and fat perhaps, but a man filled with stirring tales of past glories never to be duplicated by his adoring son because the People’s government was now a fait accompli and it was a time for building and consolidating, not for battling cossack dragons, nor tipping over czarist windmills. But now the stories echoed once again in the admiral’s mind as he looked upon the balding little man with the scraggly beard and pendulous belly standing naked on the iceberg, the half-ridiculous, half-heroic little man who was just past the prime of his middle years and who so resembled the admiral’s memory of his father, but who somehow seemed to excel even that fondly elaborated memory. And as Admiral Churkov gazed into the periscope, the smile on his lips broadened and his eyes clouded slightly with sentimental Slavic mist. . . .