volcano, which had been dormant (save for a few puffs in 1938) since 18o4, and then to drop it down the muddy tube of the volcano's caldera. Duke Rogers was actually John Paul Rogers, the geology professor. He claimed that Gulandio was going to do more than just erupt; he claimed that it was going to explode, as Krakatoa had done in the nineteenth century, creating a bang that would make the Squirt Bomb that poisoned London like a kid's firecracker.
The debris from the Krakatoa blow-up, Bobby told me, had literally encircled the globe; the observed results had formed an important part of the Sagan Group's nuclear winter theory. For three months afterward sunsets and sunrises half a world away had been grotesquely colorful as a result of the ash whirling around in both the jet stream and the Van Allen Currents, which he forty miles below the Van Allen Belt. There had been global changes in climate which lasted five years, and nipa palms, which previously had grown only in eastern Africa and Micronesia, suddenly showed up in both South and North America.
'The North American nipas all died before 1900,' Bobby said, 'but they're alive and well below the equator. Krakatoa seeded them there, Howie ... the way I want to seed La Plata water all over the earth. I want people to go out in La Plata water when it rains - and it's going to rain a lot after Gulandio goes bang. I want them to drink the La Plata water that falls in their reservoirs, I want them to wash their hair in it, bathe in it, soak their contact lenses in it. I want whores to
'Bobby,' I said, knowing he was not, 'you're crazy.'
He gave me a crooked, tired grin. 'I ain't crazy,' he said. 'You want to see crazy? Turn on CNN, Bow ... Howie. You'll see crazy in living color.'
But I didn't need to turn on Cable News (what a friend of mine had taken to calling The Organ-Grinder of Doom) to know what Bobby was talking about. The Indians and the Pakistanis were poised on the brink. The Chinese and the Afghans, ditto. Half of Africa was starving, the other half on fire with AIDS. There had been border skirmishes along the entire Tex-Mex border in the last five years, since Mexico went Communist, and people had started calling the Tijuana crossing point in California Little Berlin because of the wall. The saber-rattling had become a din. On the last day of the old year the Scientists for Nuclear Responsibility had set their black clock to fifteen seconds before midnight.
'Bobby, let's suppose it could be done and everything went according to schedule,' I said. 'It probably couldn't and wouldn't, but let's suppose. You don't have the slightest idea what the long-term effects might be.'
He started to say something and I waved it away.
'Don't even suggest that you do, because you don't! You've had time to find this calmquake of yours and isolate the cause, I'll give you that. But did you ever hear about thalidomide? About that nifty little acne-stopper and sleeping pill that caused cancer and heart attacks in thirty-year-olds? Don't you remember the AIDS vaccine in 1997?'
'Howie?'
'That one stopped the disease, except it turned the test subjects into incurable epileptics who all died within eighteen months.'
'Howie?'
'Then there was-'
'Howie?'
I stopped and looked at him.
'The world,' Bobby said, and then stopped. His throat worked. I saw he was struggling with tears. 'The world needs heroic measures, man. I don't know about long-term effects, and there's no time to study them, because there's no long-term prospect. Maybe we can cure the whole mess. Or maybe-'
He shrugged, tried to smile, and looked at me with shining eyes from which two single tears slowly tracked.
'Or maybe we're giving heroin to a patient with terminal cancer. Either way, it'll stop what's happening now. It'll end the world's pain.' He spread out his hands, palms up, so I could see the stings on them. 'Help me, Bow- Wow. Please help me.'
So I helped him.
And we fucked up. In fact I think you could say we fucked up big-time. And do you want the truth? I don't give a shit. We killed all the plants, but at least we saved the greenhouse. Something will grow here again, someday. I hope.
Are you reading this?
My gears are starting to get a little sticky. For the first time in years I'm having to think about what I'm doing. The motor-movements of writing. Should have hurried more at the start.
Never mind. Too late to change things now.
We did it, of course: distilled the water, flew it in, transported it to Gulandio, built a primitive lifting system - half motor-winch and half cog railway - up the side of the volcano, and dropped over twelve thousand five-gallon containers of La Plata water - the brain-buster version - into the murky misty depths of the volcano's caldera. We did an of this in just eight months. It didn't cost six hundred thousand dollars, or a million and a half; it cost over four million, still less than a sixteenth of one per cent of what America spent on defense that year. You want to know how we razed it? I'd tell you if I had more thyme, but my head's falling apart so never mend. I raised most of it myself if it matters to you. Some by hoof and some by croof. Ten you the truth, I din't know I could do it muself until I did. But we did it and somehow the world held together and that volcano - whatever its name wuz, I can't exactly remember now and there izzunt time to go back over the manuscript -it blue just when it was spo
Wait
Okay. A little better. Digitalin. Bobby had it. Heart's beating like crazy but I can think again.
The volcano - Mount Grace, we called it - blue just when Dook Rogers said it would. Everything when skihi and for awhile everyone's attention turned away from whatever and toward the skys. And bimmel-dee-dee, said Strapless!
It happened pretty fast like sex and checks and special effex and everybody got healthy again. I mean.