"Major, there's no way to express thirty million dead. No words. So certain men are recruited to reinvent the language."

"I don't make up the words, Gary."

"They don't explain, they don't clarify, they don't express. They're painkillers. Everything becomes abstract. I admit it's fascinating in a way. I also admit the problem goes deeper than just saying some cryptoGoebbels in the Pentagon is distorting the language."

"Somebody has to get it before the public regardless of language. It has to be aired in public debate, clinically, the whole thing, no punches pulled, no matter how terrible the subject is and regardless of language. It has to be discussed."

"I don't necessarily disagree."

"Look, Gary, if I go out and talk to different groups about this sort of thing, it doesn't make me some kind of monster who likes to expound or whatever the word is on the consequences of nuclear exchange, who likes to stand up there before a group and talk about mass death and all the rest of it. If I try to inform people so they'll do something about the situation, the gravity of it, then I'm performing a service, or at least it seems to me. I'm not some kind of monstrous creature who enjoys talking about the spectacle of megadeath, the unprecedented scale of this kind of thing. It has to be talked about and expounded on. It has to be described for people, clinically and graphically, so they'll know just what it is they're facing."

"I don't necessarily disagree, major."

"The greatest thrill of my life was getting a ride in the XBseventy. That was the greatest thrill of my life."

"Weapons technology is so specialized that nobody has to feel any guilt. Responsibility is distributed too thinly for that. It's the old warriors like myself who have to take the blame for what the socalled technocrats and multidimensional men are up to."

"What did you want to see me about exactly?" "Just nuclear war, sir. What it might be like."

"First to sixth hour after detonation the groundzero circle is drenched with fallout. By the end of the first day the doserate begins to slow down. After a few months it slows down considerably. It all depends on the megatons, the fission yield, air or surface burst, wind velocity, mean pressure altitude, descent time, median particle size."

"Ten megatons of fission produce one million curies of strontium ninety. What does that do to milk calcium levels? There's a factorfour discrimination against strontium in the human body. Newly forming bone attains a level eight times greater than the level that's acceptable. Then there's cerium one fortyfour, plutonium two thirtynine, barium oneforty. What else have we got? Zinc sixtyfive in fish. Also radioiodine. That's milk, children, thyroid cancer."

"The average lethal mutation in an autosome persists for twentytwo generations."

"The aging process, the natural aging process means there's a slowdown in cell turnover, cellular turnover. Now you get a cell population exposed to a particular radiation dose and what you have is an aggravation of the slowdown thing, the radiation on top of the natural degenerative body process. The average life span undergoes a decrease. If you're exposed to threehundredR wholebody radiation, say within seven days of when the thing hits, and then say another hundred R over the entire first year, you lose about eleven years, you undergo a lifespan reduction of eleven years. Sublethal doses also cause reproduction problems. There are problems with microcephalic offspring. There are abnormal terminations and stillbirths. There's a problem with inferior skeletal maturation of male and female progeny. There is formation of abnormal lens tissue in offspring. There are chromosome breaks. There is sterility of course. There is general reduction of body size of male offspring six years of age and under. However, the Japanese data indicates that congenital malformation frequency would not necessarily vary from the norm as far as the first postbomb generation is concerned."

"The rate is six per thousand per one hundred R. That's twentyfour hundred lethal genetic events per four hundred thousand people exposed to one hundred roentgens. Hiroshima supports this formula."

The sun. The desert. The sky. The silence. The flat stones. The insects. The wind and the clouds. The moon. The stars. The west and east. The song, the color, the smell of the earth.

I headed back to campus through the desert. The sun was low, swept by slowly moving clouds in its decline, a crust of moon also visible, more pure in silence than the setting sun. I walked quickly, the only moving thing. Nothing else stirred, not even waning light folding over stone and not the slightest flick of an bisect at the perimeter of vision. The sound of my feet was the only sound, my body all there was of moving parts. I counted cadence for a few beats in a pleasantly regimental voice, nonchalant and southern. The wind was light and dry. The plants did not move in the wind. I remembered the black stone, the stone painted black. I wondered if I'd be able to find it. It was important at that moment to come upon something that could be defined in one sense only, something not probable or variable, a thing unalterably itself. I ruled out the stone, too rich in enigma. I began counting cadence again. I managed the southern accent fairly well. I had a talent for accents, although I didn't make use of it very often because it seemed too easy a way to get people to laugh. I marched a bit longer. Then I saw something that terrified me. I stood absolutely still, as if motion might impede my understanding of this moment. It was three yards in front of me, excrement, a low mound of it, simple shit, nothing more, yet strange and vile in this wilderness, perhaps the one thing that did not betray its definition. I tried not to look any longer. I held my breath, fearing whatever smell might still be clinging to that spot. E wanted my.senses to deny this experience, leaving it for wind and dust. There was the graven art of a curse in that sight. It was overwhelming, a terminal act, nullity in the very word, shit, as of dogs squatting near partly eaten bodies, rot repeating itself; defecation, as of old women in nursing homes fouling their beds; feces, as of specimen, sample, analysis, diagnosis, bleak assessments of disease in the bowels; dung, as of dry straw erupting with microscopic eggs; excrement, as of final matter voided, the chemical stink of self discontinued; oSal, as of butchered animals' intestines slick with shit and blood; shit everywhere, shit in life cycle, shit as earth as food as shit, wise men sitting impassively in shit, armies retreating in that stench, shit as history, holy men praying to shit, scientists tasting it, volumes to be compiled on color and texture and scent, shit's infinite treachery, everywhere this whisper of inexistence. I hurried toward campus. All around me the day was ending. I crossed the highway and walked along the side of the road. There was a car in the distance, coming toward me. The wind picked up briefly. The low clouds moved across the horizon. In time the college's buildings would come into view. I looked down at the road as I walked. The wind picked up again. I thought of men embedded in the ground, all killed, billions, flesh cauterized into the earth, bits of bone and hair and nails, manplanet, a fresh intelligence revolving through the system. Once again I rebuked myself for misspent reflections. I could hear the car now, just barely, a small murderous hum, as of unnamed sounds at the end of a hall. Perhaps there is no silence. Or maybe it's just that time is too compact to allow for silence to be felt. But in some form of void, freed from consciousness, the mind remakes itself. What we must know must be learned from blankedout pages. To begin to reword the overflowing world. To subtract and disjoin. To rerecite the alphabet. To make elemental lists. To call something by its name and need no other sound. I looked up. The car passed me, an army staff vehicle with a large circular antenna. Soon the campus lights were visible and I stopped for a few seconds, watching the day burn out.