‘I want you to see a fire,’ she said.
‘A fire? I got enough of that at Wildgrove.’ All business, this woman.
‘Wildgrove was nothing.’ She led him toward Periscope Number One. ‘Odessa had the distinction of being the last city to receive a warhead. It was attacked five days ago by the strategic submarine Atlanta. It’s still burning.’
‘Odessa? You mean… they hit Russia’s cities after all? They didn’t just go for the missile bases?’
‘Basic nuclear strategy. We took out their fixed silos, but they thought we were after their cities, so they went after our cities, and… quid pro quo.’
George pressed his eyes against the soft rubber viewfinder. A frantic orange haze appeared. He adjusted the focus. Odessa vibrated with flames. Inky smoke filled the heavens. ‘Fabrics, insulation, oil stores, polymers – there’s plenty to keep it going,’ Morning narrated. ‘The survivors must inhale a demon’s breath of dioxins and furans.’
‘You know so much, Dr Valcourt,’ he said in what he hoped was a seductive tone. The periscope room, he decided, was a lousy environment for making romance bloom. He would have to take her on a date. Would the movies be best? The bowling alley? The casino?
She pulled on the periscope handle, aiming the device at the continent where the United States of America had once been located. Fires. Back to the Soviet Union. Fires. America. City fires. Oil well fires. Coal seam fires. Grassland fires. Peat marsh fires. Forest fires. A pall of mist hung in the air, black as the blood of Nadine Covington and Ensign Peach. The Northern Hemisphere was wrapped in soot.
That night – Monday night – George dreamed he was made of smoke. His smoke legs would not let him walk. He could hold nothing in his smoke hands.
Then came Tuesday. The periscope room again.
‘Can you tell me what day it is, George?’ she asked.
Was it his imagination, or were her questions getting increasingly pointless? ‘The tenth of January. I’ve been aboard three weeks.’
‘Good. But out there it’s the beginning of July.’
‘Out where?’
‘In the world.’
‘What?’
‘Time is ruined, George – one of the many effects of nuclear war that nobody quite anticipated. All those fundamental particles being annihilated – time gets twisted and folded. A minute passes in here, but out there it might be an hour, a day, or a week.’
‘Folded?’
‘Like a Chinese screen. Post-exchange physics – something even Einstein didn’t foresee. In local regions of the quantum-dynamics fabric, space is taking on the role of time, and vice versa. According to our best evidence, there are only two places where the old ways of counting time still work. This ship is one of them. Antarctica is the other. Are you upset?’
He recalled the book he used to read Holly, Carrie of Cape Cod, full of clams and hermit crabs. I am a hermit crab, he decided. Place a blowtorch against my shell, I won’t feel it. Scratch me – no pain. ‘If time is crinkled, then time is crinkled,’ he said. ‘We hermit crabs can take anything.’
‘You what crabs?’
‘Hermit crabs.’
‘Yes. Hermit crabs. Good,’ Morning said. ‘Hermit crabs seek out shells because they want to survive,’ she added thoughtfully.
‘Hermit crabs believe in the future,’ his therapist concluded.
She’s starting to care about me, he thought. Should I show her my Leonardo? (Look, Dr Valcourt – you and I are destined to marry and have babies!) No. Not yet – she won’t understand. It might come across as a joke, or a symptom of survivor’s guilt, or a weird seduction attempt.
‘Jocotepec, Mexico,’ she said.
He leaned toward the eyepiece, twisted the focus knob.
‘Today,’ she said, ‘we’re going to deal with ice.’
A crowd of peasants stood on a frozen lake. Soot walled over the sky. Cold rain fell. The survivors’ teeth vibrated, plumes of breath gushed out. They wore rags. Many went barefoot – blue ankles, missing toes. Faithlessly they huddled around a limp and sputtering fire.
‘I thought you said July.’
‘July. High noon. Those people are freezing to death. Blame the urban conflagrations. There’s so much smoke in the air that ordinary sunlight is being absorbed. Right now the average worldwide temperature is minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The soot cap migrates with the climate. In April it crossed the equator, sending ice storms through the Amazon basin. Photosynthesis has been shut down, the earth’s vegetation mantle is crumbling. For many years, this was an unanticipated effect of nuclear holocaust. Then, shortly before the war, certain scientists foresaw it. Sundeath syndrome.’
She tugged on the periscope handle. Rigid corpses littered the planet like the outpourings of some crazed taxidermist. Unable to penetrate the ice-sealed rivers and ponds, many wanderers were dying of thirst. Under bruise-purple skies a starving French farmer clawed at the iron ground with bloody fingers, seeking to exhume the potato he knew was there. At last he lifted the precious object from the dirt, staring at it stupidly. George rejoiced at the humble victory. Now eat it! The farmer fainted and toppled over, soon becoming as stiff as the stone angel that George used to sell under the name Design No. 4335.
Wednesday.
‘Fourteen months have passed,’ said Morning. ‘It is September. The strategic submarines have put to port. The soot has settled. Light can get through. Sundeath syndrome has run its course.’
‘Thank God.’
‘Don’t thank anybody. This light is malignant.’ Morning closed her eyes. ‘The high-yield airbursts created oxides of nitrogen that have shredded the earth’s ozone buffer. Ultraviolet sunshine is gushing down. What does it all mean?’ Her sigh was shrill, piercing. ‘Famine,’ she said.
George hated being difficult at this point in their courtship, but he couldn’t help asking, ‘Is this really the way to cure me?’
‘Yes,’ she said, as if that settled the matter. ‘Last year’s harvest was a disaster. The frozen ground could not receive seeds – those few crops that were planted emerged into a spring laden with smog and acid showers. This year’s harvest will be worse – roots reaching into eroded soil, leaves seared by the ultraviolet. And there is another enemy…’
The locusts rolled across the Iowa com fields in a vast insatiable carpet, stripping the crop to its vegetal bones, devouring the botanic carrion.
‘The post-exchange environment is utopia for insects. Their enemies the birds have succumbed to radiation. Stores of carbaryl and malathion have been destroyed. The omnipresent corpses are perfect breeding places. So what will our hungry survivors do? Forage? Nuts and berries are fast disappearing. Dig shellfish? Radioactive rainouts have contaminated coastal waters. Hunt? Not if the game is dying out…’
She pivoted the periscope. A rabbit pelt hung on a mass of rabbit bones. The pelt took a hop and collapsed.
‘Not if the tiny creatures that underwrite the earth’s food chains were killed when the ultraviolet hit the marshes and seas…’
Can a walrus, paragon of things fat and full, look emaciated? This one did. Its eyes were sunken. Its ribs pushed against taut, sallow flesh that had been feeding on itself and now could feed no more.
‘Not if thousands of species are at risk because the ultraviolet has scarred their corneas…’
A blind deer moved through the organic rubble that had been the woods of central Pennsylvania, pacing in crazed parabolas of misery and hunger. Poor deerie, George could hear Holly saying.
‘You know what comes next, don’t you? You know what people eat when they can no longer gather berries, hunt game, or harvest the seas?’