Brat was saying, ‘Personally, I think this race-loss business has been exaggerated. Psychotherapists like to be dramatic.’
Wengernook nodded in agreement. ‘The earth is really much more resilient than those periscope views suggest.’
The serving staff was well-meaning but graceless, dumping food on the table as if shoveling coal into the furnace of a tramp steamer. Champagne came forth in torrents. George drank enough to put music in the air and a pleasant buzz between his ears.
He had to admit it – Morning had not taken to the Aubrey Paxton idea with great enthusiasm. Just remember, he told himself, it’s a big step for a woman, having a kid, restarting a species. You must let the idea grow on her.
‘They don’t run very good movies on this ship,’ said Reverend Sparrow. ‘War and Peace, what a boring mess.’
‘What should they run, your old TV shows?’ sneered Overwhite.
‘Ever see King of Kings?’ said Sparrow. ‘It’s wonderful the way Orson Welles pronounces the T in “apostles.”’ He placed George’s shoulder in a warm grip. ‘I’m still praying for you.’
‘That’s nice,’ said George.
As soon as dessert arrived – the evacuees could corrupt themselves with either German chocolate cake or lemon meringue pie – Sverre drew a carving knife from a ham and clanked it against his water glass. All eyes shot toward him. The serving staff scurried out of the hall.
‘Antarctica,’ whispered Randstable. ‘He’s going to tell us about Antarctica.’
‘Tonight’s banquet was advertised as a celebration,’ the captain began. ‘Dr Valcourt reports that, when we dock at McMurdo Station, six rational and competent survivors will disembark. We are here to rejoice in your cure. You have looked extinction in the face and lived. Operation Erebus will succeed.’
He set the carving knife on a linen napkin, poured gin into a gold goblet, drank.
‘Extinction. Such a sterile word, so Latin. What does it mean? When you kill a species, good guests, you do not simply kill its current members, you also kill the generation that lies dormant in its germ cells – and, thus, the generation that the descendants of those germ cells would have made, and the next generation, and the next. Extinction is an endless crime, quietly slaughtering all the lives that would have been. The human birth canal is the only way into human existence, gentlemen. There is no other port of entry.’
‘What is this guy, one of those warrior intellectuals?’ whispered Wengernook.
‘Lawrence of Arabia joins the Navy,’ said Brat.
Sverre took off his claw-hammer coat, tossed it on the floor, and rolled up his shirt sleeve.
‘At a certain moment in the great nuclear arms race, it became common knowledge that an extinction was in the offing. The universe trembled with the news. Your species mattered, gentlemen – more than you knew. The planets reeled, the trees wept, the rocks cried out. But from which place did the greatest anger issue? From the place that keeps my kind. We have always been with you, waiting to get in… and now the door has been shut.’
‘That keeps his what?’ said Brat.
‘His kind,’ said Overwhite.
‘Oh God,’ said Randstable.
‘Shut,’ repeated Sverre.
George’s bullet wound began to throb. Waiting to get in…
‘So great was our anger that, shortly before the war, we achieved a tenuous hold on life,’ said Sverre. ‘We even managed to insert ourselves into your affairs.’
‘Do any of you know what he’s talking about?’ said Brat.
‘Oh, dear, I think so,’ said Randstable. ‘Oh, God.’
Sverre picked up the knife, which was long and shiny with fat. What happened next would visit George’s dreams for many nights to come. Slowly, wincingly, Sverre opened his arm. Arteries came asunder. Muscles perished. A lustrous black liquid spurted from the wound, as if someone had drilled for, and found, oil in his flesh. A sulphurous odor rushed out. Once on the tablecloth, the blood did not die, but collected itself into a viscous lump. The lump became a small, screaming, human head with a face that bore a disquieting resemblance to Sverre’s.
‘We are the inheritors who can never take title,’ said the bleeding captain. ‘We are the darkblood multitudes whose ancestors were exterminated before they could sire us,’ asserted the pilot of the City of New York.
He sat down, pressed a napkin against his wound, and anesthetized himself with gin. The blood-head dissolved into a puddle.
‘We are the unadmitted,’ said Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre of the United States Navy.
Nuclear war entails many surprising effects. George had learned this from his therapist. The unadmitted…
Overwhite’s lips encircled words he could not voice. Brat looked dredged in flour. Wengernook tore the unlit cigarette from his mouth and eviscerated it. An aura of wrath surrounded Reverend Sparrow. ‘Foul wizard!’ he cried. ‘“But the abominable and sorcerers shall have their part in the lake that burneth with fire!”’ he quoted.
‘Mercy! A discontinuity!’ gasped Randstable, pulling a pocket calculator from his vest.
‘You mean it’s a trick?’ said George.
‘Trick? No – a quantum aberration.’ Randstable stroked the little keyboard. ‘Normally such things happen only at the subatomic level, when your pions and antineutrinos and so on burst out of nothing as vacuum fluctuations.’ A string of zeros appeared on the display screen. ‘In the macroworld, where you have your people and so on, the expected frequency of such an event is very, very low – just shy of zero, in fact.’
The captain told of his locked-out race. He took his guests back to the time of the materializations, bade them see the Antarctic glaciers gestate men, women, and children, each scheduled to gain the continent at the high point of his would-be life, the time of greatest fulfillment and promise.
‘Watch us rise through the ice, crack into the frigid dawn, rub the snow from our eyes, stretch our hypothetical limbs. My parents were killed in the Battle of Washington exactly two weeks before they would have conceived me. I would have gone to Annapolis. I would have served my country with honor and distinction. I would have—’
Bypassing the goblet, Sverre drank directly from the bottle.
‘Do you know what our outrage was worth? A year. A year is nothing, gentlemen. Half my life is already gone. I can tell you how many hours I have left. How many minutes.’
Faces jumped into George’s brain. Nadine Covington. Theophilus Carter. Ensign Peach. Darkbloods all.
Morning Valcourt.
Was she one of them? Was Aubrey’s mother a woman from the future?
‘If unadmitted, you must use your sojourn well,’ said Sverre. ‘A year is nothing.’
First priority – get warm. And so you become pirates, plundering the scopas suit barges on their transpacific crossings.
‘Such attire is excellent for keeping out the cold,’ the captain explained.
A year. Nothing. You cannot raise a family in a year. You cannot forge a great republic. But you can, with luck, after making appropriate political arrangements, track down certain key individuals and call them to account. So you build a courthouse. Judge’s bench. Witness stand. Prisoner’s dock. A Multiprong submarine lies at the bottom of McMurdo Sound. Unadmitted Navy frogmen bring her up. You set sail. You snatch six men from the jaws of the holocaust. You want more – President Orlaff, Senator Krogh, the Secretary of the Navy, the National Security Advisor – but they are already dead.
‘Courthouse?’ Brat tried to eat a forkful of German chocolate cake, failed. ‘Is that what he said?’
‘Courthouse,’ muttered Randstable.