William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

Still, the early chaos had settled down to an eerie routine aboard me Looking Glass. He could sense a bizarre fascination among his people as they slowly garnered data about what had worked and what hadn’t, what had survived and what hadn’t. From the Looking Glass, the general thought ruefully, he had at least a blurred view into the new world he had temporarily inherited. He had already decided he didn’t want his inheritance or the responsibility for the next steps. He moved forward where me colonel was scrolling—Christ, they had him thinking computer talk—through tracking maps.

“Sam,” he said, “what the hell is going on with Harpoon?”

“Beats me, sir,” the colonel replied. “I think he’s getting ready to put down in Baton Rouge. That’s where the man is supposed to be, if everything worked right on the ground. God, it’s high-risk. First of all, there are mobs all over every surviving airport in the country.”

“Troops deployed?”

“Several battalions.”

“But it’s the other opposition that worries you?”

“Hell, yes. Nothing visible. But we can’t see beneath the Gulf of Mexico.”

The general stared into the screen. “Pull me on the Buff, Sam,” he said.

“Polar Bear?”

“Yes.”

The screen flicked through a maze of fluttering projections and then settled on a map that boxed part of Alaska, the northernmost reaches of Canada, and the edge of Victoria Island. A small white cursor stood stationary just millimeters shy of the edge of the continent and the beginning of the Beaufort Sea and then the Arctic Ocean. The cursor edged forward, as the computer adjusted to the plane’s flight path, and then stopped again. The B-52 was almost on top of its PCP, the Positive Control Point at which the bomber required further orders from Alice before making the ultimate commitment to go in.

“Do you want to call them, sir?” the colonel asked.

“No!” the general replied in a voice so stem he startled himself. “Goddammit! No!”

The drone of the eight straining engines went unheard by the five people inside Polar Bear One, the din of their own silence overwhelming the mechanical noise. Only Radnor broke the quiet. “Request permission to leave station, sir,” he radioed upstairs. Good God damn, Kazaklis thought. This is the second time in ten minutes Radnor, whose bladder had held through twelve-hour practice missions, had asked to come up to use the head. “Granted,” the pilot grunted. Kazaklis understood what this was. The tension of the rendezvous with Elsie had given way now to a dull, nagging anxiety that crept slowly down the spine and then bored inward to settle, like an ulcer, in the stomach. With Radnor, it seemed, the anxiety was settling a little lower. Where the hell was the Looking Glass? The waiting was worse than the action.

Omaha Beach syndrome, the PRP psychiatrists hot-wired into the pilot’s brain. Your crew is over the side now, commander. Cut away from mother, cut away from their world, their safe ship. Off in a bobbing ocean limbo between a reality understood but left behind and a new reality they can’t comprehend. Don’t want to comprehend. The beach, commander, the alien beach. Make it real for them, commander. Limbo is dangerous.

Fuck off. Wire your postmortem crap into somebody else’s head. Game’s over.

Aha, commander. Can’t handle the end of the world? What does the end of the world mean to you, commander? A father, a mother, a girlfriend? A childhood lake where the rainbow bit, leaped, dived, and fought young hands? A fire in the rain? Those misty Oregon woods where child’s eyes saw pterodactyls swoop on webbed wings and older eyes see them swooping again? Is that your lost world, your new world, perhaps? Pterodactyls swooping again? Have you lost a song? A dream? A memory? You can keep the memory, commander. But memories are dangerous now, devil children of the mind. Revenge is safer.

Kazaklis pulled at the lumbering airplane. The Buff seemed to struggle against him, a friend no more, its wings no longer his wings. He prodded it higher, through 40,000 feet, then 45,000 feet into the rare, thin reaches of the stratosphere where each pound of fuel would yield a few more miles. But the drag of the SRAM missiles, tucked under each wing, tugged against him. The weight of Elsie’s last precious gift rebelled against him. He was a behemoth now, a half-million pounds of gas and weapons and machines and flesh and blood and minds and memories and one useless body blissfully immune to PRP threats of fathers and mothers and lovers and dreams and songs and lost lakes of a world gone. Careful, commander. The aircraft’s sluggish. Who’s sluggish, commander? Weighted down. Omaha Beach syndrome, commander. Fuck off. You’re over the side too, commander. An old girlfriend. Thanks, mind invader. How are you, Sarah Jean? Are you at all, Sarah Jean? Kazaklis shook his head. Go away, girl-image. Gone-image. But seventeen-year-old blond curls tumbled past milky cheeks, over soft shoulders, down around firm breasts hidden, forbidden, beneath a pompon sweater. Coos Bay! Rah! Rah! Got yerself a little blond poon, has ya, bub? Shut up, Pa. Best get the poon, bub, cuz that’s all yer gonna get from that one; mite too fancy, that one. Pa said you were too fancy, Sarah Jean. Halupalai was driving Kazaklis nuts.

“Goddammit, gunner, go back and sit down!”

The Hawaiian, bending over the telegraph machine behind the pilot’s seat, jerked upright at the unexpected violence in the words.

“You’re pacing up and down like a goddamn expectant father,” Kazakhs spat.

“Just looking for the message, sir,” Halupalai said defensively. “We oughta have the message by now. We only got two hundred miles to go.”

Kazakhs let his shoulders droop. The waiting was driving them all crackers. Where was the Looking Glass? Where was the message giving them passage through their control point, confirming their targets, revealing the codes to arm weapons? Halupalai, assigned the job of decoding the instructions, had been moving back and forth between his seat and the telegraph since the refueling. Kazakhs suddenly felt guilty. He didn’t like blowing at Halupalai. Nobody liked getting angry with Halupalai.

“Hang tough, Pops,” he said soothingly. “Go on back and sit down. The doc will be out soon enough. And he’ll tell you it’s a boy.”

Halupalai slouched back toward his rear seat.

“It’s a boy,” Moreau mused, “a goddamn boy.”

Kazakhs bristled again. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna start the Gloria Steinern shit. Not now.”

“Settle down, commander,” Moreau said evenly. “Little jumpy, aren’t we? History was getting the better of me. Not penis envy. After they tested the first bomb at Trinity, they sent Truman a coded telegram in Potsdam. Just like the one we’re waiting for. ‘It’s a boy,’ the message said. ‘It’s a girl’ meant the bomb was a dud.”

“Thanks for the history lesson,” Kazakhs said sullenly. “Maybe ours will say ‘It’s a person.’ Then we can guess.”

Moreau didn’t reply at first. It’s a girl, Harry. Sorry, Mr. President, a bomb without a cock. No blow-jobs for the Japs. No phallic club to hold over Uncle Joe Stalin. No need for strategic penetrators plunging into Mother Russia. No need for the big hard ones buried in the womb of America’s prairies. Man’s ultimate failure, Mr. President. It’s a girl.

“No,” she finally said. “Ours will be a boy too, Kazakhs.”

“Yeah.”

“You ever wonder where we’d be if it had been a girl, that first one?”

“Still fightin’ the Japs door to door.”

“Come off it.”