What Do Moammar Gaddafi and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Have In Common?

This Is No Longer An #ExistentialTrickQuestion

Chapter 15

On the morning of August 17th, even before Wanda told Wayne not to worry, no one had put out his eyes, the pitch-black back of the van was already quite crowded, and Phase Two of The Plan had gone into effect.

Fast Ed the Bartender shuddered and twitched on the gritty floor between Rapid Ray and Pooh Bear, their new brains aching to burst from the catatonic depths in which boggling made them founder, while their old brains went about the routine business of keeping them alive.

Sugarporn was coming around, and she dangled her legs from the storage shelf over the cab of Sam & Dave’s U-Haul Adventure-In-Moving rental, her head wedged between her knees. She was treating herself for shock as she’d been taught in a first aid course at the Holtzendorf YMCA. She was humming a tune whose words went like this: It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

***

Amin, Harriet Tupperells, Ester Minor, Gottlieb Goforth, and Cindy Gnomoure were on their fourth game of hearts. Amin was winning. Again.

“One enters a game,” King Gottlieb proclaimed, “with the churlish desire to entrust one’s fate to blind chance, eager to face the irrational judgment of the redoubtable stars.” Therefore, Gottlieb reasoned, whatever redemption one found in codified distraction was every bit as manifest when one competed in total darkness, especially since no one had brought a playing deck.

“Our invisible subjects,” Gottlieb demanded, “Against what more noble a stick would you measure man’s capacity for honor, integrity, and justice than this opportunity to play by the fated rules alone? Verily we say unto you, our humble idiosyncratics, nothing is closer kin to godliness than our present predicament, and we should seek the best possible benefit of this portentous dark day and engage in our fortuitous game of hearts, to see ever more plainly in these dismal hours of our blindness, and hear the breathless silence of the billions of the dead, for we may never more be so airlessly blessed,” he concluded, and Amin the Libyan seconded the motion. He did suggest, however, that each participant ante up a dollar a phantom deck, “To make things interesting,” as he put it, offering his smoldering joint to Cindy.

“Here. Take a hit of this. Dynamite shit,” he wheezed. “It’s Biafran.”

***

Amin had won the first three imaginary hands, and now, midway through the fourth, he held all the trumps and was threatening to break the bank.

“It’s uncanny,” sighed Harriet, “I was born and have been a gambler all my life, and I’ve yet to win a thing.”

***

There is no reasonable explanation for Amin’s presence in either Clemson or the Palace. Materex has classified its files on Amin top secret, and while the Hall of Records offers more information on Amin than it does on ice, much of it is simply nonsense. In one report, for instance, Amin was a cultural exchange student in philately who had fallen out of favor with his government. He suspected Harriet Tupperells was an agent of Moammar Gaddafi, and that she had been ordered to execute Amin.

In another, he is the illegitimate son of the President of the United States who had been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency since birth, at which time a small control mechanism was implanted in the infant’s forehead. He was then given to Abdul Adulla Abdullest, the CIA’s operative in the “council tent” (Libya’s equivalent to the President’s “cabinet”) of Moammar Gaddafi, the world leader whom preglacial computers had singled out as the most dangerous threat to human life.

Gaddafi was usually pictured in the news as a boorish illiterate or a suave savage when he was pictured at all. One classic telecast concluded Gaddafi was the perfect example of what happens when you give missiles to a country whose people have never watched Soupy Sales and still think the Zippo lighter is a gift from God, whatever It was.

In the background, you could see disheveled and emaciated peasants sprawled in the dust, staring vacantly as an educator from the Surgeon General’s office demonstrated the proper way to put on a condom, using a bowling pin. The squalor behind the reporter on this newscast was actually shot at a camp of thousands of homeless people near Los Angeles. The report was financed and sanctioned by the Libyan Foreign Ministry and the Ethiopian Royal Academy of Science and Technology.

Materex maintains Gaddafi was actually a dangerous dreamer who was both widely and unwisely read. He chose to project the public image of a scruffy, unkempt, violent buffoon to assure his privacy. The truth about Gaddafi was this: he was a brilliant researcher who had been driven mad in a previous life as Galileo Galilei.

***

Gaddafi was obsessed with the properties of water. He was particularly interested in why water was at its densest just prior to freezing. If ice were denser than water at 32.0000000000000000° F, it would sink as it froze. As it was, ice floated and insulated the water beneath it. So even if the air above sank to sixty below and stayed that low for months and years, there would still be liquid water in the ocean, and life would go on.

At sixty below a mastodon’s breath solidifies instantly and falls with a tangible tinkle. At sixty below, it is impossible to bring a match to the kindling point. If ice did not float upon freezing, if ice were to sink, millions of square miles of water exposed to extremely cold temperatures would freeze solid from the depths to the surface in a matter of days. And this is the secret Gaddafi sought: a way to transform water from a precious liquid to a worthless metal. A perverse philosopher’s stone.

He got the idea while reading a novel about a weapon called Ice-Nine. The book was written by a man who had survived the melting of Dresden, Germany, which was not made of water and which is, at this very instant, being demolished again by ice.

In that novel, the son of the scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and whose brother may have bombed Nagasaki discovered an isotope whose melting point was over 100° F. When this isotope was added to normal water, it transmitted its mutated melting point to its unsuspecting neighbors.

This happened so quickly that if even a single molecule of Ice-Nine were introduced into any water, anywhere on the planet, there would not be a single drinkable drop left within three weeks.

***

Gaddafi quickly saw the impracticality of developing such a weapon. A malignant isotope would be no better than AIDS, that most unfortunate of second generation American biological agents. There’d be no way to control it. And it was indiscriminate in its efficiency.

No, Moammar was convinced there had to be a better way. Alter the density of water in its three common forms. Control the spatial and temporal boundaries of that alteration, and you might have something to bargain with. Threaten to unleash this weapon on the Great Lakes region in mid-November… Why, it would make him a world power.

And best of all, his surprisingly heavy water (“The Sinking Stinker,” as it was affectionately listed in Jane’s Military Fashion Annual) was an eminently safe weapon. Ice would still melt at 32°.

Come spring and Ali Ahkbar willing, the Great Lakes would thaw. There would be water to irrigate the millions of acres of new farmland fertilized with the ripening corpses of millions of the terminally unemployed. It would be at least as humane as the neutron bomb.

If not for the sudden intervention of the current ice age, Gaddafi could have deployed his dense water weapon within three years.

—30—

Epilog In Media Res

It occurs to me that some straggler might want to read all of Trout’s Tale in its God-given order, assuming I live long enough to publish all of it. I guess I could start another stack and publish it in order there, but where’s the fun in that?

Instead, what I’ve currently decided to do is add this epilog as an index to previous posts in the order in which they were not written, but in the most recent order they have appeared in the Hall of Records. Links will become active as new URLs are generated.

Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.

Trout’s Tale thus far…

Frontal Matter And Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33