They felt it, he and Tibor; a final truth, and yet it was, for them in their ignorance, without reference sources, both leaving and finding the summertime, the sun-struck woodland; it was life and the leaving of life fused, since they did not quite make it out rationally, and it frightened them, and yet they turned and returned to it, because — and perhaps exactly because they could not understand — it was a balm; it salved them.
Now, Father Handy and Tibor needed a power — mekkis, Father Handy thought to himself — to come from Above and aid them. . . on this, the Servants of Wrath agreed with the Christians: the good power lay Above, Ubrem Sternenzelt, as Schiller had once said: above the band of stars. Yes, beyond the stars; this they were clear on; this was modern German.
But it was strange, depending on a poem whose meaning one did not actually grasp; he wondered, as he unfolded and searched through the old stained gas-station maps once given out free in prewar days, if this was not a stigma of degeneracy. An omen of badness. . . not just that times were bad but that they themselves had become bad; the quality was lodged within them.
His conference now was with the Dominus McComas, his superior in the hierarchy of the Servants of Wrath; the Dominus sat, large and tepid, with strangely cruel teeth, as if he tore things, not necessarily living, in fact much harder — as if he did a job, a profession, teethwise.
“Carl Lufteufel,” the Dominus McComas said, “was a son of a bitch. As a man.” He added that because of course one did not speak of the god part of the god-man, the Deus Irae, like that. “And,” he said, “I’ll give you ten to five that he made martinis with sweet vermouth.”
“Did you ever drink sweet vermouth straight or with ice?” Father Handy asked.
“It’s sweet piss,” McComas grated in his horrid, low voice, and, as he spoke, cut into his spongy gum with the tail of a wooden match. “I am not kidding; it’s nothing but horse piss they’ve bought.”
“Diabetic horses,” Father Handy said.
“Yeah, passing sugar.” McComas grunted a ha-ha; his round, red — red as if they had short-circuited and the metal in them had heated up, dangerous and improper — eyes sparked; but this was normal, as was his half-zipped fly. “So your inc,” McComas grated, “is going to roll all the way to Los Angeles. Is it downhill?” And this time he laughed so that he spat onto the table. Ely, seated off in a corner, knitting, stared at him with such flat hate that Father Handy felt uncomfortable and turned his attention to the creased gas-station maps.
“Carleton Lufteufel,” Father Handy said, “was Chairman of the Energy Research and Development Administration from 1982 to the beginning of the war.” He spoke half to himself. “To the use of the gob.” The great objectless bomb, a bomb which detonated not at one particular spot on the Earth’s surface but which acted so as to contaminate a layer of the atmosphere itself. It therefore (and this was the sort of weapons-theorizing that had gone on prior to World War Three) could not be headed off, as a missile could be by an antimissile, or a manned bomber, no matter how fast — and they had gone quite fast, by 1982 — by, incredibly, a biplane. A slow biplane.
In 1978 the biplane had reappeared in the D-III. Defensive III, a flap-flap man-made pelican which held within it a limitless fuel supply; it could circle, at low altitude, for months, while, within, the pilot lived off his suit as Our Grandparents had lived off trees and shrubs. The D-III biplane had a tropic device which directed its efforts when a manned bomber, even at fantastic altitude, came; the D-III began to ascend when the bomber was still a thousand miles away, releasing from between its wings a sinkerlike weight of vast density which pulled the plane to the proper altitude; the D-III and its pilot were actually jerked high, where no atmosphere to speak of existed. And the sinker — it had actually been called that even though it did just the opposite; it in fact lifted — carried the biplane and the man within toward the manned bomber, and all at once the two objects met. And everyone died. But “everyone” was only three men in all: two in the bomber, one in the D-III. And, below, a city lived on, lit up, composedly functioning. .While other D-IIIs circled, circled, month after month; like certain raptors, they hovered for a seeming eternity.
However, it was not truly eternity. The antimissiles and the D-IIIs had kept off the fatal wasps for a finite time, and then at last the Dies Irae had come — for everyone, because of the gob, the great objectless device which Carleton Lufteufel had detonated from a satellite at an apogee of five thousand miles. It had been imagined that the U.S. would in some mysterious fashion survive and prosper, perhaps because of a New Year’s Eve funny-hat artifact distributed to the multi-millions of patriotic USers; it connected to cephalic veins and gave restitution to a bloodstream rapidly losing red corpuscles. The vacuum-cleaner salesmen’s convention-style headgear, however, had been finite, too; it had failed for many people long before the Krankheit — the sickness — had faded. The great, grand corporation which had sold the Pentagon and the White House on the funny hats — it too had disappeared, gotten not by bone-marrow-destroying fallout but by direct hits from missiles which ducked and wove faster than the anti-ms twisted and darted. Don’t look back, Satchel Paige had once said; something may be gaining on you. The missiles from People’s China had not looked back and the things gaining on them had not reached them in time; China could die with the happy knowledge that out of their miserable underground “backyard” factories they had developed a weapon which even Dr. Porsche, had he still been alive, would have shaken his head at — nodded at with admiration.
But what, Doctor, Father Handy thought to himself as he shuffled and unfolded the ancient gas-station maps, had been the authentic really dirty weapon of the war? The gob of the Deus Irae had killed the most people. . . probably about a billion. No, the gob of Carleton Lufteufel, now worshiped as the God of Wrath — that had not been it, unless one went by mere numbers.
No; he had his own favorite, and, although it had killed only a relatively few million people, it impressed him: its evil was so blatant; it glowed and stank, as a U.S. Congressman had once said, like a dead mackerel in the night’s dark. And it, like the gob, was a U.S. weapon.
It was a nerve gas.
It caused the organs of the body to eat one another.
“Well,” the Dominus McComas growled, picking at his hardy teeth, “if the inc can do it, fine. If I was an Elter I wouldn’t give a damn if it looked like Lufteufel or not; I’d just get a good fat wicked bloated pig-face up there; you know, a swilling face.” And his own swilling face beamed, and how strange it was, Father Handy thought, because McComas looked like one would imagine the Deus Irae to look. . . and yet, the color photo had shown a man with pain-smeared eyes, a man who seemed ill in a deep and dreadful way even as he gorged on roast chicken with a lei around his neck and a girl — not pretty — to his right. . . a man with shiny, heavy, tumbled black hair and too much stubble, even though no doubt he carefully shaved; it was subdermal, showing through: not his fault, and yet it was the mark. But of what? Blackness was not evil; blackness was what Martin Luther in his translation of Genesis had meant when he said, “Und die Erde war ohne Form und leer.” Leer; that was it. That was what blackness was; when spoken it sounded like “layer”. . . a film negative, which, having been exposed to unshielded light, had, due to chemical action, turned to absolute opaqueness, to this quality of feerness, this layer of glaucomalike blindness. It was like Oedipus wandering; what he saw, or rather what he failed to see. His eyes were not destroyed; they were really covered: it was a membrane. And so he, Father Handy, did not hate Carleton Lufteufel, because that billion who had died had not gone like those who had been gassed by the U.S. nerve gas; its death had not been monstrous.
And yet this had ended the war; there was, after the toxic rain had ended, insufficient personnel to continue. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, he thought: Of the dead only say good things, such as — well, he thought, perhaps this: You died because of the idiots whom you hired to rule you and protect you and collect terrible taxes from you. Therefore, who was the ultimate cretin, you or they? Anyhow, both had perished. The Pentagon had long ago gone; the White House, the VIP shelters. . . de mortuis nil nisi malum, he thought, correcting the old saying to make it come out the more wisely: Of the dead only speak evil. Because they were that stupid; it was cretinism carried to the dimension of the satanic.