William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

“There’s a big difference, Mo, and you know it.”

“No, I don’t know it,” she replied angrily.

“Dry alcoholics fail all the time, Mo, and it’s one poor soul’s sad tragedy. He doesn’t take all of AA with him.”

“So what’s your answer, Dr. Oppenheimer?” Moreau asked hostilely.

“I don’t have one, dearest daughter,” he said sadly. “I simply know I was wrong, that nothing goes on forever. I simply know that I want you to get rid of those gray phalluses you pack around with you and find one life-giving one of your own. I want you to settle down and try to find, for as long as you can, what I never was able to give your mother.”

Moreau stared into the fire. She had not known, until she began college, that her mother had committed suicide.

“Sorry, Dad,” she said. “It’s a little late.”

“Very late,” he said.

Moreau’s arms felt numb from her fingernails back over the top of her shoulder blades. In front of her the yellow dials of the instrument panel wobbled like birthday candles and she flexed and unflexed her jaw muscles to keep her eye in focus. Her head throbbed violently. She had not turned since the conversation stopped. How long, in God’s name, had it been?

Across from her Kazakhs could feel the water, a mix of sweat and eye-ache tears, flood under his visor, down over his oxygen mask, and drip into his lap. Elsie’s contrails blurred in the visor fog and he brushed at the protective plastic shell fruitlessly. In frustration he wrenched the visor back up inside his helmet, mopped at the wetness with his glove, and sorted out the four jet streams again. He glanced quickly at his watch. 0903 Zulu. Eleven minutes. Jesus. How the hell had Moreau held the plane that long? It was like being on the rack. Minutes were hours. They had taken less fuel than he would like, more than he had expected. But this was moving beyond both physical and psychological tolerances. And it had to be worse above them in the tanker. The percentages were turning. Fast. “Elsie!” he rasped. “You wanta break it off? Maybe you can ride the fumes down to the lake.”

“Negative. We’re gonna play it out. Might be the gallon that gets you to Paris, pal.” The tanker pilot’s voice sounded as tight as an overtuned violin.

Kazakhs turned to Moreau. “How you doing, copilot?”

“I’ll make it. Keep your eyes on the road.” She didn’t sound any better. Kazakhs was worried. They were taking this too far.

“Thanks for the juice, Elsie,” he radioed. “You did great. It’s time to do it the easy way.”

“Hang in there, commander.” Elsie’s voice was tinny again. “You’ll thank me later.”

Kazakhs felt the slightest shudder, saw a dark puff from the tanker’s number-four engine, and then just three contrails.

“Now!” he screamed. “Breakaway!”

“Breakaway!” Elsie shouted in panicky unison. “Breakaway! Breakaway!”

Two contrails. One contrail. The tanker wobbled precariously.

Moreau heard a violent scraping behind her, then a tremendous clanging crash at her side. She turned instinctively right and saw the ugly head of the refueling probe bounce away from the metal window strut near her ear and then scratch slowly across the Plexiglas. No sparks! her mind shrieked; oh, God, no sparks!

Down! She could hear Kazakhs yelling, ghostlike, far, far away. Down! Take her down! But she already had begun to take the B-52 down. Fast. At the first scream she had automatically nosed the plane into a dangerously deep dive. Her ears were ringing. Down! The yellow Master Alarm light glared angrily at her. Out the window she could see Elsie pulling in the probe. One engine still sputtered. But the tanker slowly settled back on them, the leading edge of the tail section barely above their cockpit.

Elsie, get your nose down!” Kazakhs shouted. “Your tail’s on top of us!”

Slowly the tanker’s nose eased over, the tail came up, and Elsie slid into a shallow dive. For one long, agonizing moment the two aircraft moved in almost parallel dives, no more than one hundred feet apart, and Moreau stared horrified into the winking red beacon in the tanker’s belly.

“It isn’t going to work, Elsie,” Kazakhs said in a low, haunted message to the tanker.

Silently, as if on orders, Elsie’s right wingtip arched up. And then she spun, like a fighter plane, wingtip over wingtip, to the left and out of Moreau’s sight. The copilot felt the B-52 shake as the tanker’s tail scrambled the air currents in front of the bomber’s left wing. Then Moreau slowly began to pull their plane level.

“Jump, damn you!” Kazakhs said in a final plaintive order. “They can’t, commander,” Moreau said quietly. “No,” Kazakhs replied. “They knew that.”

“Yes.”

Kazakhs reached over and pulled the curtain again, shutting out the world.

Below, in the navigation quarters, Tyler watched his screen in silent fascination. The tiny image swirled downward like a dead mosquito. Then it appeared to strike the ground. Poof! Damnedest thing. It seemed so real. He looked up from his screen with a troubled, puzzled expression. It had seemed too real.

Radnor could feel the eyes turn toward him, but he refused to look back at his crewmate. Up the stairs, in the rear of the topside cabin, Halupalai slowly released his hands from an ejection lever turned clammy wet. He swiveled his head and looked into the forward cabin. The vacant redness enveloped Kazakhs and Moreau again, the night sky gone, and all Halupalai could see was the back of two white helmets trained, straight ahead, on the closed curtain.

In the cockpit, not a word was exchanged for minutes. Kazakhs had retaken the controls and Moreau tried to will some vitality back into her lifeless arms, some sense into her benumbed head.

“Nice job,” Kazakhs said to her, his monotone barely discernible.

Moreau did not respond immediately. “Do you think you could have done that?” she asked.

Kazakhs paused too. Their words seemed to be lobbing back and forth like tennis balls caught on a stop-action viewer. “I suppose so.”

“What Elsie did.”

“I know.”

“Took guts.”

“Guess so.”

“Guess so?”

“Don’t really know what it takes, do we? Life comes along and hands us one and we react.”

Moreau slumped in exhausted exasperation. She had neither the heart nor the energy for anger. “You guess so,” she said with lifeless weariness. “Life comes along. You react. How can you write those people off that way? What does life mean to you, Kazakhs? Do you even think about it?”

His words came back without emotion. “Life’s a game, Moreau,” he said. “A game you play the best you can.”

“Good God,” she murmured. “A game. And what if you lose?”

“You tell yourself you were playing the Yankees,” he said blankly.

The silence went tomblike. A long while later, Kazakhs glanced sideways at Moreau. She sat stiffly in her seat. He wondered which of them was better off now, although that was a matter of very small degree. Was she, this strange woman, his chance partner who had believed in something and had it all come apart? Was he, who had believed in nothing and had it all come true? He glanced at his watch and saw it was past one a.m. in Oregon, these not being Zulu-time thoughts. His old man would be up in a couple of hours, lacing the morning coffee with the usual Jim Beam and heading into the same eternal woods as if this were just another day, with the fallout, if it had reached the Coos this soon, being just more hay-fever pollen. He saw Sarah Jean… and the contrails flick away one by one. Briefly he wondered if this abrasive, perplexing woman sitting next to him was as fraudulent in her life cover as he was in his. He snorted quickly, inhaling the thought and the tears, and radioed downstairs, asking for a fix on their Positive Control Point, the last stop sign the Air Force left for them before the plunge low over Russian tundra.