"No Laughing Matter" got its title from what a judge in the story said during a top-secret court-martial of the crew of the American bomber Joy's Pride, on the Pacific island of Banalulu, one month after the end of World War Two.

Joy's Pride itself was perfectly OK, and in a hangar there on Banalulu. It was named in honor of the pilot's mother, Joy Peterson, a nurse in obstetrics in Corpus Christi, Texas. Pride had a double meaning. It meant self-respect. It meant a lion family too.

Here's the thing: After an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and then another one was dropped on Nagasaki, Joy's pride was ordered to drop yet another one on Yokohama, on a couple of million "little yellow bastards." The little yellow bastards were called "little yellow bastards" back then. It was wartime. Trout described the third atom bomb like this: "A purple motherfucker as big as a boiler in the basement of a mid-size junior high school."

It was too big to fit inside the bomb bay. It was slung underneath the plane's belly, and cleared the runway by a foot when Joy's Pride took off into the wild blue yonder.

As the plane neared its target, the pilot mused out loud on the intercom that his mother, the obstetrics nurse, would be a celebrity back home after they did what they were about to do. The bomber Enola Gay, and the woman in whose honor it was named, had become as famous as movie stars after it dropped its load on Hiroshima. Yokohama was twice as populous as Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

The more the pilot thought about it, though, the surer he was that his sweet widowed mother could never tell reporters that she was happy that her son's airplane had killed a world's record of civilians all at once.

Trout's story reminds me of the time my late great-aunt Emma Vonnegut said she hated the Chinese. Her late son-in-law Kerfuit Stewart, who used to own Stewart's Book Store in Louisville, Kentucky, admonished her that it was wicked to hate that many people all at once.

Whatever.

The crewmen aboard Joy's Pride, at any rate, told the pilot on the intercom that they felt much as he did. They were all alone up there in the sky. They didn't need a fighter escort, since the Japanese didn't have any airplanes left. The war was over, except for the paperwork, arguably the situation even before Enola Gay cremated Hiroshima.

To quote Kilgore Trout: "This wasn't war anymore, and neither had been the obliteration of Nagasaki. This was 'Thanks to the Yanks for a job well done!' This was show biz now."

Trout said in "No Laughing Matter" that the pilot and his bombadier had felt somewhat godlike on previous missions, when they had had nothing more than incendiaries and conventional high explosives to drop on people. "But that was godlike with a little g," he wrote. "They identified themselves with minor dieties who only avenged and destroyed. Up there in the sky all alone, with the purple motherfucker slung underneath their plane, they felt like the Boss God Himself, who had an option which hadn't been theirs before, which was to be merciful."

Trout himself had been in World War Two, but not as an airman and not in the Pacific. He had been a forward observer for the Army field artillery in Euriope, a lieutenant with binoculars and a radio, up with the infantry or even ahead of it. He would tell batteries to the rear where their shrapnel or white phosphorous or whatever might help a lot.

He himself had certainly not been merciful, nor, by his own account, had he ever felt he should have been. I asked him at the clambake in 2001, at the writer's retreat in Xanadu, what he'd done during the war, which he called "civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide." He said without a scintilla of regret, "I made sandwiches of German soldiers between an erupting Earth and an exploding sky, and in a blizzard of razor blades."

The pilot of Joy's Pride made a U-turn way up in the sky. The purple motherfucker was still slung underneath. The pilot headed back for Banalulu. "He did it," wrote Trout, "because that is what his mother would have wanted him to do.

At the top-secret court-martial afterward, everybody was convulsed with laughter at one point in the proceedings. This caused the chief judge to bang his gavel and declare that what those on trial had done was "no laughing matter." What people found so funny was the prosecutor's description of what people did at the base when Joy's Pride came in for a landing with the purple motherfucker only a foot above the tarmac. People jumped out of windows. They peed in their pants.

"There were all kinds of collisions between different kinds of vehicles," wrote Kilgore Trout. No sooner had the judge restored order, though, than a huge crack opened in the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It swallowed Banalulu, court-martial, Joy's Pride, unused atom bomb and all.

TIMEQUAKE