William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

When the messenger of God’s tape stuck, echoing the Rapture over and over inside the pilot’s helmet, Kazakhs finally let out a disapproving grunt, no real thought attached to it, and Halupalai quickly swept through the capricious currents, finding an offering of ballads and doleful love songs instead. The Crazy Eddies were gone now, headed for the hills, and the Oxy-5 jingles, too, in final acknowledgment that acne was not the problem. If a picture paints a thousand words, then why can’t I paint you?… There were no station call letters, no pauses for news, no whining interruptions from the Emergency Broadcast System. Just a tape left running, while others ran, too.

Kazakhs took no heed of the music. He stared silently into the red-haloed silhouette of his one-fingered glove and tried to balance its certainty against the haunting assault of Tyler’s maniacal words—coward, coward, coward. He thought of Elsie trading her last drop of fuel, and everything else she had, to give them those precious extra miles. To what? Palm trees on a South Sea island? And the lonely man at Klickitat One, passing up the Jack Daniel’s at Ruby’s, waiting for the ash instead to give them one more eye on bandits approaching over the Pole. He thought about vengeance for the millions dead. Could they be avenged—should they be?—by killing millions more? But he could not answer his own question. He sidetracked it, as he did the music, in some obscure niche in the honeycomb of his mind.

Flying aimlessly south over central Alaska now, only Moreau made an attempt at communication. When the radio came on, she cast a concerned glance over her shoulder at Halupalai’s intently hunched back. She placed a hand on the pilot’s shoulder, shaking it lightly to share her sense of danger. But Kazakhs kept his eyes on the silhouette of his rebellion and his mind on its bleak and guilty wanderings. He gently removed her hand in an unspoken reply that said if north toward nowhere had no purpose, south toward nowhere might have less. She briefly called downstairs to determine if Tyler had been badly injured. The voice came back at first with surreal calm. “I have no injuries, captain,” Tyler responded. Then the voice turned almost cadaverous in its haunt. “I am EWO ready,” he said.

Moreau’s head rattled with the decisions they had to make. Where were they going? Anywhere? Or were they simply turning their part in a mass suicide into a nice, simple, private ceremony? What did they do if American fighters, half-brothers of the MIG’s, came up after them? Someone had to go down and give Tyler a hypo to knock him out, but she was not up to it yet. Radnor was already out, flying solo now. Could they go anywhere without navigators? They needed to do fuel calculations and examine their options. They also needed to get rid of the weapons. The bombs were wasted weight, the SRAM’s aerodynamic flaws burning precious fuel. The questions bounced without answers through her head. The music bounced, too.

If a man could be two places at one time, I’d be with you…. The music was gnawing at her, an invitation to emotional disaster. Tomorrow and today, beside you all the way…

She started to turn toward Kazakhs to protest, warn, plead. She knew the lyrics. If… If…

Downstairs, the two isolated crewmen had come full circle. Tyler babbled wildly at his crewmate, crazily muddling duty and flag and courage with Radnor’s wife. Radnor seemed not to hear him.

If the world should stop revolving …

Tyler shook his crewmate ferociously and Radnor turned toward him, his placidly happy face meeting Tyler’s hideously tortured mask without fear. Radnor smiled blissfully.

Spinning slowly down to die…

He serenely placed a finger to his lips, shushing the navigator. Shhhhhh, Tyler, the music.

I’d spend the end with you….

Upstairs, Moreau reached over and shook the pilot desperately. “Good God, Kazakhs!” He looked up in surprise. She turned in desperation toward Halupalai, whose back was still hunched, oblivious to all.

And when the world is through…

Radnor’s smile spread peacefully across his face. He happily showed Tyler the small object he had withdrawn from his alert bag.

One by one, the stars would all go out….

Calmly, he placed the white capsule in his mouth, appeared to bite once, and started to swallow. His face was rapturous.

Then you and I…

The young radar operator slumped forward, his freckled forehead gently coming to rest below his scope, its tracking arm spinning slowly through the night, slowly above his mussed sandy hair.

Would simply fly away….

Tyler watched in stuporous wonder. Far away, in some abandoned radio-station studio, a tape spun silently between songs. Tyler reached over tentatively and lightly nudged his friend, receiving no response. The tape whirred into the next offering. A long, long time ago… Tyler leaned back the other direction and reached into his own alert bag… I can still remember… withdrew a different object… how that music used to make me smile… stroked it and made sure the clip was full, reached up toward the Kodak icon and patted it reverently… can’t remember if I cried… and then unhooked his radio headset, the second before the music died, and started up the steel ladder, his .45 in hand.

Had Tyler been intent on anything else, had he been watching the tracking arm spinning through the night on his own radar scope, he would have seen a most remarkable sight. He would have seen a squadron of incognitos, at least fifteen strong, edging into the comer of his screen. Had he stayed but a few seconds longer, he would have seen a still more remarkable sight. He would have seen the incognitos begin to maneuver. But Tyler no longer had an interest in incognitos. As a consequence, no one in Polar Bear One saw the approaching Bison bombers. And no one saw their maneuverings as they made a gracefully sweeping and symbolic turn.

“One of our bombers has aborted, general.” Alice swiveled in his chair and looked at the communications officer as if he had not heard her correctly.

“Polar Bear One turned, sir. South. Southwesterly, actually.”

“No.” Alice frowned at her and shook his head. “I’m afraid so, sir. I checked the data three times.” Alice swiveled slowly away from her, staring slightly upward at the countdown watch. Briefly, anger and frustration coursed through him and he slammed his beefy fist into the high desk in front of him. Then he slumped in weariness. “Southwesterly?” he asked quietly.

“Yes, sir. Across Alaska toward the North Pacific.”

Alice did not look back at her, but he felt her steady gaze. Sam’s too. He grew pensive in his weariness, his mind drifting back to the early days of the cold war when he had been assigned to the spanking-new B-52s. It had been a great youthful adventure then, not quite so suicidal, not quite so total. Simpler. The lightness more certain. He also remembered the islands. They all had an island, their own private preserve in paradise, and they argued about them, rambunctiously, outrageously, in bars and locker rooms and during parties in the little apartments a captain’s pay could afford. They’d pull out the maps of the South Pacific, figure their fuel loads and headings, and bicker endlessly. Ponape? Tough luck, buddy. That’s ours. One crew to an island. You can have Bikini and roast your bafts. They’d laugh and laugh. The wives never laughed. It’s a joke, Madge. Dammit, it’s a mean and dirty business and we need to laugh about something. But he’d go to sleep at night, as the rest of them did, and the dream warp would take him low over the last reef, the surf cresting into an azure lagoon, his sleek new B-52 cruising toward beckoning palms. While the rest of the world fried. And he would snap out of the dream, snap out of the joke, and go back to work. As they all did.