'How can you compare them?' Andy Chudko said. 'They were in two different fields.'
'The answer seems obvious only at first. Be very careful.'
'I don't think it seems obvious at all,' Chudko said.
I stood in the doorway. Bloomberg and Andy Chudko occupied the beds. Anatole was supine, two pillows beneath his head, hands folded on his chest. Chudko sat on my bed, facing the doorway, his right foot (extended to infinity) at a 45degree angle to the door (when closed). I noted other angles, elevations, intervals, and then situated myself carefully on the chair by the window, between the beds, facing past both men toward the open doorway, toward the corridor or trade route. Chudko's head and torso met without benefit of a neck. His whole body in fact seemed welded, part joined to part in bursts of heat and pressure. His silver guitar was on the other chair, the chair by the door.
'I don't understand you, Bloomers. Gary, you room with this guy. What do you make of him?'
'Our next secretary of defense.'
'My roommate will be glad to hear that I'm off my diet as of an hour ago. I think he'll rejoice in that.'
'I do. I definitely approve.'
'I've seen my mistake,' Bloomberg said. 'I thought I would become more efficient if I ate less. I thought the discipline of dieting would be good for me. It would make me quicker in body and therefore quicker in mind. It would give me a sense of physical definition and therefore of spiritual awareness. This was all wrong. I thought I would feel better if I weighed less. I thought I would have more respect for myself. I thought I'd gain in selfassurance and in the general loftiness of my ideals. None of this happened. It was all part of the Jewish thing, you see. I thought the selfcontrol of dieting would lead to the selfcontrol needed to unjew myself. But it didn't work out that way. As I lost weight, as I continued to struggle against food and its temptations, I began to lose the idea of myself. I was losing the idea of my body, who it belonged to, what exactly it was, where all the different parts of it were located, what it looked like from different angles and during the various times of the day and evening. I was losing the most important part of my being.
Obesity. What I had considered selfcontrol was really selfindulgence. To make me pretty. To give me quick feet. I realize now that these things aren't important, that they're nothing compared with my individual reality. I dropped to twoninety, then to two eightytwo. My selfawareness started to fade. It was a terrible shedding of the skin. I was losing more and more of myself. I was losing more of the old body and more of the newly acquired mind. If this disappearance were to continue, I would soon be left with only one thing. Gentlemen, I allude to my Jewishness. This is the subsoil, as it were, of my being. It would be the only thing left and I would be, in effect, a fourteenyearold Jewish boy once more. Would I start telling silly jokes about my mother? Would I put some of that old ghetto rhythm in my voice-jazz it up a little? Would the great smelly guilt descend on me? I don't want to hear a word about the value of one's heritage. I am a twentiethcentury individual. I am working myself up to a point where I can exist beyond guilt, beyond blood, beyond the ridiculous past. Thank goodness for America. In this country there's a chance to accomplish such a thing. I want to look straight ahead. I want to see things clearly. I'd like to become singleminded and straightforward in the most literal sense of those words. History is no more accurate than prophecy. I reject the wrathful God of the Hebrews. I reject the Christian God of love and money, although I don't reject love itself or money itself. I reject heritage, background, tradition and birthright. These things merely slow the progress of the human race. They result in war and insanity, war and insanity, war and insanity.'
I got up and closed the door. Then I returned to the chair by the window. I turned it around and sat with my arms over the back of the chair. I faced the closed door Bloomberg raised his right arm, maintaining that position- body supine, one arm bent across his chest, second arm in the air-for the length of the ensuing narration. He appeared mad, an imprisoned prophet or a figure in a very old painting, a man about to die, his last word spoken to a finger tip of light.
'As the world's ranking authority on environmental biomedicine, I have been asked to lend the weight of my opinion to yet another tense seminar on the future of the earth. My friends, there is nothing to fear. Soon we'll harvest the seas, colonize the planets, control every aspect of the,weather. We'll develop nuclear reactors to provide the Englishspeaking world with unlimited energy, safely and cheaply. Our radio astronomers will communicate with beings at the very ends of the universe. We'll build hydraulic robots to make automation obsolete. We'll manufacture plastic lungs and brains. We'll reprogram human cells with new genetic information to wipe out inherited disease. Obsolescence itself will become obsolete. We'll recycle everything. Shoes to food. Candles to paper. Rocks to light bulbs. The philosophical question has been asked: what will become of death? Gentlemen, I have the answer right here. The sealed,nvelope please.'
Andy Chudko looked at me. He got up, took the guitar from the chair by the door and then opened the door and left, closing it behind him. Bloomberg began to speak again. I was sorry Chudko hadn't left the guitar. In some obscure way, its presence would have been a comfort.
16
The motel was about two miles from campus. I walked out there along the edge of the road. Fragments of glass flared in the sun. I passed a number of dead animals, just scraps of fur now, small pieces of flesh completely macadamized, part of the highway. Finally I reached the motel. It was a gray bunding, barely distinguishable from the land around it. Major Staley had been staying there since the school year began. I didn't know what kind of car the major drove so I went into the office 'and got his room number from an old woman halfasleep over a bowl of Shredded Wheat. The major had a towel in his hands when he came to the door. He was wearing his uniform trousers and shirt, the shirt unbuttoned and outside the pants, sleeves rolled up around the forearms. Some blue ROTC manuals were stacked on a table. Above the bed was a threedimensional picture of mountains.
'Wife and kids are still up in Colorado. I sure as hell miss them. I hope to have them down here real soon now. Our house should be ready in ten days. I've lived in more places than, a stray cat.'
'There's a kind of theology at work here. The bombs are a kind of god. As his power grows, our fear naturally increases. I get as apprehensive as anyone else, maybe more so. We have too many bombs. They have too many bombs. There's a kind of theology of fear that comes out of this. We begin to capitulate to the overwhelming presence. It's so powerful. It dwarfs us so much. We say let the god have his way. He's so much more powerful than we are. Let it happen, whatever he ordains. It used to be that the gods punished men by using the forces of nature against them or by arousing them to take up their weapons and destroy each other. Now god is the force of nature itself, the fusion of tritium and deuterium. Now he's the weapon. So maybe this time we went too far in creating a being of omnipotent power. All this hardware. Fantastic stockpiles of hardware. The big danger is that we'll surrender to a sense of inevitability and start flinging mud all over the planet.'
'We're talking about a onemegaton device. All right, you're standing nine miles from ground zero. If it's a clear day, you get seconddegree burns. Guaranteed. One hundred megs, you may as well forget it. If you were seventyfive miles out, you'd still get seconddegree. Depending on the variables, your house might even ignite. That's just the first flash. After that comes the firestorm, like Tokyo, like Hamburg, like Dresden, like Hiroshima. Structurally the older cities in the U.S. are very susceptible to firestorms. Building density is high and combustible material per building is high. Tucson might escape a firestorm. New York, Baltimore, Boston-forget it. Nagasaki didn't get too much burn. They had a low density and the wind was blowing right. Hamburg was something else. Hamburg was a hot place to be. Over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit if you can imagine what that's like. They found bodies naked except for shoes. That was heat that did that, not fire. Heat disintegrated d the clothes. They found bodies shrunken, dry as paper. That was the intense heat. The other thing in a firestorm is carbon monoxide.'
'I've had a checker ed career at best.'
'I think what'll happen in the nottoodistant future is that we'll have humane wars. Each side agrees to use clean bombs. And each side agrees to limit the amount of megatons he uses. In other words we'll get together with them beforehand and there'll be an agreement that if the issue can't be settled, whatever the issue might be, then
