Listened not to the song but to the quartet of motors on the gloomy,
loud field.
Above the coughing and the clamor, the roar and thump of other
engines--came the long run, tightening nerves.
"There she goes!"
"War's over."
"Shut up! And who told you, lieutenant, anyhow? And what?"
The ship--wider than she was long and just under a hundred feet from
tailfin to bombardier's glass snout--gained altitude. Below, the island
sank in the sea of air--palms, runways, warm, damp tropical odor of
mold, hangars and administration buildings, flags.
There was now only the sky and the Pacific....
They would--someday--laugh at the B-29 even while they admired her,
and more especially, the men who flew her. Schoolkids in a museum of
the far centuries--walking along plush ropes--examining the early
aeronautical exhibits. "What a clumsy contraption! How dangerous! They
used to explode in the air, you know. They could only fly about five
thousand miles--bumped along at three hundred an hour. Hour, mind you!
What on earth did they do to pass the time in such tight quarters?
They fought with guns--yeah--those tubes. Central fire control, they
called it--they could shoot eleven pairs at once. Shoot? A chemical
explosion that pushed streamlined bits of metal from the tubes at low
velocities--fast enough, though, to kill a man--or bring down such
a crazy craft. Who'd think--one just like that--took the first real
missile--?"
The bright kids-to-be, perhaps. Their galleons and triremes.
She took off--the then-perfect air-frame, slick and silver --a
multiplicity of engineering feats. She climbed. Five thousand. Eight.
"Okay. Pressurize."
The ears, hearts, lungs of sixteen men lost the feel of altitude and
swiftly accepted the bubble of air that now flew in a metal skin.
Colonel Calm turned over the controls to Major Waite. The colonel's
famous fighting smile flashed upon the proud navigator, the flight
engineer, the idle bombardier, and the co-pilot. "You know the course,
major."
The course, he meant, to the enemy.
The major had set plenty of cities on fire in his time. His brief time;
he was twenty-six. Twenty-six years old and he'd flown courses that
had burned out, smothered, smashed, and otherwise eliminated something
on the order (he figured, being a man of mathematical bent) of three
billion hours of human life. Expunged on that milk run. (You take the
average life expectancy in enemy cities, multiply by days in a year
and hours in a day, and multiply that by two further factors: average
fatalities in a raid and number of raids led by Major Waite. Three
billion man-woman-child hours, conservatively).
Colonel Calm glanced at Mr. Learned, the lone journalist permitted
to go along--to write the eyewitness account. Mr. Learned sat on a
parachute, his spectacles aslant, his hair awry, lost sleep whitewashed
on his sharp countenance. His knees made a desk for an aluminum
hospital chart board and on this, on yellow paper, using a pencil of a
soft sort with which his pockets bulged, he scribbled. Once, he hitched
at the collar of his unfamiliar uniform. A moment later, he glanced up.
He smiled.
Colonel Calm nodded and scrambled into the tunnel that ran to the rear
of his ship.
It was a journey he detested.
The passageway--a straight, metal intestine lined with cloth--traversed
the bomb bay and was of a diameter sufficient to contain one crawling
man. If a pressurized B-29 were hit badly--or if it blew a blister--a
man in the tunnel would be rammed through it by compressed air like a
projectile and hurled against a bulkhead--head first, or feet first--at
the speed of a hundred and sixty miles an hour.
The colonel crawled--gnawed by claustrophobia. He pushed his chute
ahead in the dim tube--because that was regulations. He wished he had
chosen to drag it, instead. The thing stuck. He lunged up over it and
his ribs came in contact with the curved top of the tunnel. He was
half-jammed there. Sweat broke out on him--he tried to breathe--his
ribs hurt. He could yell--they could get a rope around his foot and
haul him back. He inched clear of the chute--pushed it forward, and
went on more slowly, struggling now with the afreets of panic--putting
them down like mutineers, savagely.
Now he thought of the bomb bay--the oblong maw atop which he fought
his way. Big as a freight car. Big as two garages set end to end. Big
enough to hold--how many horses? A dozen? And what did it contain?
His sweat dried up. His skin pimpled. Coldness seemed to flush the
tube as coldness flushes a belly into which ice water has been gulped.
Was the air here invisibly alive? Did uranium exude invisible, lethal
rays--like radium? Or did it lie inert--in uncritical masses of unknown
sizes (but not big)--waiting for union?
He went on.
When, at last, his head appeared at the far end of the tunnel he wore,
again, his placid fighting smile.
The top CFC man dawdled in his swivel chair. The two blister gunners
nodded and looked back into the neutral nothing of their provinces. The
third chap smiled softly.
Colonel Calm came down the ladder, stretched, picked up his chute
familiarly, and went on to the radar room. It was, he thought, glancing
back at the tunnel opening, hardly bigger than a torpedo tube. The
craft in many ways resembled a submarine, when you thought about it.
There were four men in the radar room. Two at tables. One squatting,
rocking with the plane's slight motion; and one stretched on the Army
cot. He saw the colonel.
"'Shun!" he bawled.
"At ease, for God's sake!" Colonel Calm went to an old man who stared
into the hood of a scope with the fascinated pleasure of a child seeing
his first stereopticon slides. "Well, doctor? How is it going?"
Sopho glanced up--and he smiled, too. That was the thing about the
colonel's mouth and eyes: you saw and you also smiled. Even when the
kamikaze had connected, when Number 3 engine was on fire--pluming smoke
and the CO2 wasn't making headway, when flak splashed black flowers
on the morning, when tracers rose like tennis balls, the deck was
slick with gunners' blood, and when the inadequate, high, freezing air
whistled through the ship--scaling fast, bits of plexiglass. Even then,
he smiled--and you smiled back--and went on.
"Wonderful gadget," Dr. Sopho said, pointing to the hood, within which
the colonel could see a scanning light-streak and the radiant wake,
following and fading perpetually. "After this trip," the scientist went
on, "maybe we can go back to work. Real work. Maybe--" he pointed at
the scope--"use that for saving a few lives, instead."
"Hope so." The colonel thought of his tedious wife--of weary years in
Washington--desiccated military establishments in Texas--the drain and
drag of peacetime. "Hope so," he lied. "Everything set?"