Stephen Baxter - Last and First Contacts

That night the Goering dropped stick after stick of these ‘Tallboy’ bombs on the site from which the rocket plane seemed to have been launched. I have no idea whether the assault was successful or not. The movie people filmed all this, in colour.

With the bombs dropped, we flee east, towards the dawn. I must try to catch some sleep …

Day 7 . We have already crossed China, which is the subject of a colonisation programme by the Japanese, a mirror image to what the Germans are up to in the west. Eurasia is a vast theatre of war and conquest and misery, a theatre that stretches back all the way to the Channel coast. What a world we live in!

Still, now we are past it all, a goodly chunk of the world’s circumference already successfully traversed. Our escort has fallen away. Our last supply convoy was Japanese; Jack has threatened to drop their raw fish suppers out of the bomb bays.

And now, alone, we are facing our ultimate target: the Pacific Ocean. We are so high that its silver skin glimmers, softly curving, like the back of some great animal.

Jack is taking his turns in a pilot’s seat on the bridge. This afternoon I was given permission from Ciliax to go up there. I longed to play with the controls. ‘I have a hunch I’m a better stick man than you,’ I said to Jack.

Jack laughed. Sitting there, his peaked cap on, his flight jacket under a webbing over-jacket, he looked at home for the first time since I’d met him. ‘I dare say you’re right. But Hans is a better man than either of us.’

‘Hans?’

Hans, it turned out, is the flight deck’s computing machine. Hans can fly the Beast on ‘his’ own, and even when a human pilot is at the stick he takes over most functions. ‘I think the name is a German joke,’ Jack said. ‘Some translation of “hands off”.’

I crouched beside his position, looking out over the ocean. ‘What do you think we’re going to find out there, Jack?’

Jack, matter-of-fact, shrugged. ‘Twelve thousand miles of ocean, and then San Francisco.’

‘Then how do you explain the fact that nobody has crossed the Pacific before?’

‘Ocean currents,’ he said. ‘Adverse winds. Hell, I don’t know.’

But we both knew the story is more complicated than that. This is the Pacific Mystery.

Humanity came out of Africa; Darwin said so. In caveman days we spread north and east, across Asia all the way to Australia. Then the Polynesians went island-hopping. They crossed thousands of miles, reaching as far as Hawaii with their stone axes and dug-out boats.

But beyond that point the Pacific defeated them.

And meanwhile others went west, to the Americas. Nobody quite knows how the first ‘native’ Americans got there from Africa; some say it was just accidental rafting on lumber flushed down the Congo, though I fancy there’s a smack of racial prejudice in that theory. So when the Vikings sailed across the north Atlantic they came up against dark-skinned natives, and when the Portuguese and Spanish and British arrived they found a complicated trading economy, half-Norse, half-African, which they proceeded to wipe out.

Soon the Europeans reached the west coast of the Americas.

But beyond that point the Pacific defeated them.

‘Here’s the puzzle,’ I said to Jack. ‘The Earth is a sphere. You can tell, for instance, by the curving shadow it casts on the moon during a lunar eclipse.’

‘Sure,’ said Jack. ‘So we know the Pacific can’t be more than twelve thousand miles across.’

‘Yes, but western explorers, including Magellan and Captain Cook, have pushed a long way out from the American coast. Thousands of miles. We know they should have found Hawaii, for instance. And from the east, the Chinese in the Middle Ages and the modern Japanese have sailed far beyond the Polynesians’ range. Few came back. Somebody should have made it by now. Jack, the Pacific is too wide . And that is the Mystery.’

Jack snorted. ‘Bull hockey,’ he said firmly. ‘You’ll be telling me next about sea monsters and cloud demons.’

But those ancient Pacific legends had not yet been disproved, and I could see that some of the bridge crew, those who could follow our English, were glancing our way uncertainly.

Day 8. We are out of wireless telegraphy contact; the last of the Japanese stations has faded, and our forest of W/T masts stand purposeless. You can’t help but feel isolated.

So we three, Ciliax, Jack and I, are drawn to each other, huddling in our metal cave like primitives. This evening we had another stiff dinner, the three of us. Loathing each other, we drink too much, and say too much.

‘Of course,’ Ciliax murmured, ‘the flight of a rocket-plane would last only minutes, and would be all but uncontrollable once, ah, the fuse is lit. Somebody on the ground must have known precisely when the Goering would pass overhead. I wonder who could have let them know?’

If that was a dig at Jack or me, Jack wasn’t having any of it. ‘“Somebody”? Who? In Asia you Nazis are stacking up your enemies, Wolfie. The Bolsheviks, partisans. You and the Japanese will meet and fall on each other some day—’

‘Or it may have been Americans,’ Ciliax said smoothly.

‘Why would America attack a Nazi asset?’

‘Because of the strategic implications of the Goering. Suppose we do succeed in crossing the Pacific? America has long feared the vulnerability of its long western coastline…’

Jack’s eyes were narrow, but he didn’t bother to deny it.

In 1940 America was indeed looking over its shoulder nervously at Japan’s aggressive expansion. But the Pacific proved impassable, the Japanese did not come. So, during the Phoney War, America stood firm with Britain. In April 1940 Hitler overran Denmark and Norway, and in May outflanked the Maginot line to crush France. The blitzkriegs caused panic in the British Cabinet. Prime Minister Chamberlain was forced out of office for his poor handling of the war.

But Hitler paused. The North Sea was his boundary, he said; he wanted no conflict with his ‘Anglo-Saxon cousins’, who stood united against him.

Churchill was all for rejecting Hitler’s overtures and fighting on. But Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, argued that Hitler’s terms were acceptable. While Churchill retired fuming to the backbenches, the ‘scarecrow in a derby hat’ was Prime Minister within the week, and had agreed an armistice within the month.

Hitler was able to turn his full energies east, and by Christmas 1941 had taken Moscow.

All this happened, you see, because the Japanese had not been able to pose a threat to the Americans. If not for the impassibility of the Pacific, America’s attentions might have been drawn to the west, not the east. And without the powerful support we enjoyed from America, if Hitler hadn’t been moved to offer such a generous peace in 1940 – if Hitler had dared attack Britain – the Germans would eventually have found themselves fighting on two fronts, west and east. Could Russia have survived a lesser Nazi assault? Is it even conceivable that Russia and Britain and America could have worked as allies against the Nazis, even against the Japanese? Would the war against the Nazis eventually have been won ?

All this speculation is guff, of course, best left to blokes in pubs. But you can see that if the Pacific had been navigable the whole outcome of the war with the Germans would have been different, one way or another. And that is why the Goering , a plane designed to challenge the ocean’s impregnability, is indeed a weapon of strategic significance.

This is what we argue about over lunch and dinner. Lost in the vast inhuman arena of this ocean, we are comforted by the familiarity of our petty human squabbles.