William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

“And what you need, Moreau,” he said through the gleaming white teeth that worked so well in the Boom-Boom Room, “is a good fuck!”

Moreau turned quickly away. The green screen flashed a computer message: Game Over.

Far to the south a young American lieutenant, new to the bowels of Cheyenne Mountain, watched the Canadian officer’s screen in fascination, distracted from his own.

Blip.

The little spasm from the lieutenant’s own screen, trained on a patch of ocean in the Georgia Banks off New England, caught the corner of his eye. Blip. Blip. Blip. Next to him, on a third screen, the blips emerged almost simultaneously off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Another screen did a staccato dance from a patch of the Pacific beyond Catalina in Southern California.

The general watched his men cross-check computer printouts. But he knew what they showed—many zeroes, computer code for missile launches—and knew that already the printouts were being dispersed to more than one hundred strategic sites around the world, setting a preliminary attack conference into motion. This had happened 147 times in the past two years. He pushed a button that changed the alert code from Apple Jack to Lemon Juice.

The general sighed and shook his head slightly. Damned computers. And he waited.

In the alert room Halupalai stared into the window, but he did not see its western vista. Instead, he saw a handful of Dali clouds dancing beneath his feet far below over the verdant jungles of Vietnam. The gunner, oldest of the crew Kazakhs commanded, had retreated, as he often did, into the past. From the serenity of his tail bubble, the sky lay beneath him, the heavens everywhere but up. Gossamer wisps of cirrus floated just beyond his fingertips. Endless and placid, unearthly blue in its paleness, the sky surrounded and enveloped him. There was no bliss like this. Halupalai had found himself.

He could understand Gagarin: I am eagle! He could understand Borman approaching the edge of the moon: In the beginning… He was free. He was unfettered. He was alone.

Even the words, echoing preternaturally through his bubble, were part of the splendid solitude.

“Twenty seconds. Ready, ready. Now.”

The words came from afar, not disruptively. They, too, were part of his realm, no tension to them. He watched for the first gray globule they signaled. It came quickly, followed rapidly by a stream. The bombs floated downward, wafting like gray feathers, tumbling gently through the cirrus, growing tiny and innocent and natural and good as they descended into the cotton-candy clouds far below.

Halupalai felt his world begin to tilt, arch gracefully on its side in a wide sweeping turn toward home. So well was Halupalai attuned to his world and its own special rhythms that he saw the first glint of the intruder almost simultaneously with the huge B-52’s radar operator who sat with the rest of the crew far ahead of Halupalai’s tail-gun bubble. Suddenly Halupalai’s quiet world erupted into raw chaos. Still, he watched almost passively, fascinated, as the missile soared upward. Then he broke into uncontrollable rage. The intruder scarred his landscape, raped his world. His brown hands turned white in their grip on the fifty-caliber machine gun, the electric jolts of the gun pulsing through his arms as he fired and fired.

Halupalai’s bullets impacted on nothing, the strafe racing invisibly into his heavens, randomly and futilely, never meant for an intruder like this. The SAM missile raced nearer, its outline growing more menacing as its outline clarified. The gunner fired relentlessly, without meaning or hope but in outrage and frustration at the sacrilege. The B-52 groaned in the desperate strain of its effort at evasion.

Halupalai stopped firing, his arms limp. He watched the missile race toward him, catching only a shark flash as it soared by toward the starboard engines, and he reached for the ejection lever that would cast him into the now hostile sky over Vietnam.

The explosion snapped Halupalai out of his reverie. He saw Moreau brush past Kazakhs, heard the thunderclap inside the green computer screen, heard Moreau’s taunt and then heard Kazaklis thunder back. He relaxed, the tension gone from the memory of his ecstasy gone wrong.

Halupalai watched Kazaklis flash the toothy smile, the same one he used in the Boom-Boom Room to lure woman after woman to his side. He saw the commander slip another quarter in the old Space Invaders computer game which he played as relentlessly as Halupalai had once fired his gun.

The big Hawaiian also watched as Moreau turned and moved away, past the poker tables and chess sets, away from Kazaklis and the row of computer games in the game room the Air Force had provided for its bored nuclear warriors. She was framed briefly against the panoramic picture window looking out on a western plateau, pine trees blurring into the purple haze of a far-off mountain range, the sun setting majestically and spreading multicolored rays across the land. He had lived this life so long that the window did not strike him as unusual. Curtains were drawn back to the edges of the scene. The fact that it was nighttime and midwinter, the window showing sunset and autumn, did not jar him. There were no windows in this hardened bunker, braced inadequately against megatons. The picture window was a painting, perfect in its three-dimensional concept, designed to give them all a homey illusion of reality. It did not strike him as odd. He did not think of it at all.

Moreau swept out the door, her head passing under the alarm klaxon. She retreated quickly toward her quarters after the pilot’s remark, hoping she had not shown her agitation. She disliked him intensely. He was a woman-user, which put her at a distinct disadvantage, because she was a manuser. Not quite in the same way, but close enough.

Normally she kept her emotions under rigid control. Even with Kazaklis. Even knowing he was hung-over after a sleepless night and still could perform nearly flawlessly. It was immensely frustrating, knowing that Kazaklis could break all the rules and get away with it. It wasn’t the game that had set her off. She felt superior to Kazaklis on that, because she had gone beyond him. It was his whistling, the infernally joyous whistling. Of “America the Beautiful,” for God’s sake. As if he indeed were saving the world as his butt swayed right, then left, in the rhythmic chase of the little aliens on his green screen.

Moreau had played the game, too—attacking it methodically and mercilessly. Early on, Moreau had broken the game’s computer program and learned the secret of the count. Soon Moreau learned the secret of green out, the secret of moving in so tightly on your adversaries, allowing them to move in so tightly on you—just as she was trained to do skimming treetops in her giant B-52—that the adversaries couldn’t see you, couldn’t kill you. If you were good. It was a valuable piece of knowledge. But to Kazakhs that seemed to be the final secret and he had stopped there, which was a telling shortcoming in Moreau’s eyes. Moreau had gone further. She had learned the secret of the narcotic. At great cost. And with seemingly little practical value, which irritated Moreau further because she was in a very practical profession and she knew the secret of the narcotic was part of that profession as well. Moreau had stopped playing the computer game after learning the ultimate secret. She had not stopped playing her professional game after learning its secret. Knowing is not curing. She thought briefly of her father. Then she hurried on down the hallway to her room.

Inside, she sprawled across the bunk in the room she shared with a woman tanker pilot. The room, deep in the bunker, was different from the others. The fortress, the men called it. A fortress within a fortress. Her roommate did not like the way Moreau had decorated it, particularly the picture of the medieval chastity belt she had stretched across the door. Inside, the mock Playgirl centerfold of Edward Teller completely confused the other woman. As did the full-color photo of a mushroom Moreau had planted between Teller’s scrawny legs. Her roommate was complaining again, which at the moment, Moreau didn’t even want to try to handle.