The End of the Whole Mess: And Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

you to Days of Our Lives."'
    'I don't get you,' I said. 'And I have no idea what I'm looking at.' Of course I knew; it was an island - not Borneo itself but an island lying, to the west of Borneo identified as Gulandio, - with a mountain in the middle and a lot of muddy little villages lying on its lower slopes. It was hard to see the mountain because of the cloud cover. What I meant was that I didn't know what I was looking for.
    'The mountain has the same name as the island,' he said. 'Gulandio. In the local patois it means grace, or fate, or destiny, or take your pick. But Duke Rogers says it's really the biggest time-bomb on earth ... and it's wired to go off by October of next year. Probably earlier.'
    The crazy thing's this: the story's only crazy if you try to tell it in a speed-rap, which is what I'm trying to do now. Bobby wanted me to help him raise somewhere between six hundred thousand and a million and a half dollars to do the following: first, to synthesize fifty to seventy thousand gallons of what he called 'the high-test'; second, to airlift all of this water to Borneo, which had landing facilities (you could land a hang-glider on Gulandio, but that was about all); third, to ship it over to this island named Fate, or Destiny, or Grace; fourth, to truck it up the slope of the 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 douche in it.'
    '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 file://C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\DOUGIE\Stephen King\Stephen King - ... 7/22/2006
    The End of the Whole Mess
    Page 11 of 13
    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