Gods Without Men (2 page)

The pilot was a young buck, twenty-one or so, head of dark hair, little dandyish mustache. Rich kid. As he stripped off his jacket and goggles, he looked around in wonder, asked where on earth he was.

By that time the project was well advanced. Schmidt had built a vortical condenser to store and concentrate the paraphysical energies flowing through the rocks. A crystal was set into a gimbal on the tip of the tallest stack, angled toward Venus. He was developing a parallel piezoelectric system, based on his study of Tesla, but for now was sending signals using an old Morse key, with an aetheric converter to transform the physical clicks into modulations of the paraphysical carrier wave. He explained all this to the pilot, who listened intently, taking in the machinery, the piles of books and notes. He seemed impressed.

“And what message are you sending?”

There was a question. Schmidt’s message was love. Love and brotherhood to all beings in the galaxy. Two hours of redemption nightly, starting soon as the planet was visible over the horizon. Two hours of repeating his invitation:
WELCOME.
He didn’t want to talk about it, not with a stranger, made some joke about higher powers, more things than were visible to the naked eye.

The pilot smiled. “Hope you know what you’re doing.”

“We’ll see, I suppose.”

From then on the kid would land his Cub at the Pinnacles every couple of weeks. His daddy was some big farmer down in Imperial Valley, but Davis, that was his name, wanted more out of life than orange groves and wetback pickers. Though Schmidt didn’t ask for a thing, he gave him money to buy books and equipment. Clark Davis was the first disciple, the first to understand the true nature of Schmidt’s calling.

One night they flew over the Nevada state line, touched down at a ranch near Pahrump, a property with neon beer signs in the windows and a row of semis parked out front. Davis wanted to show him a good time, said it wasn’t normal to be on his own so much. Against his better judgment—the whole escapade was against his better judgment—Schmidt found himself sitting nervously, drink in hand, as the girls lined up in their silky nothings, pouting and sticking out their behinds. Davis acted all man-of-the-world, choosing a big-titted greaser and winking encouragingly as he followed her out, like Schmidt was some nervous teenager getting his dick wet for the first time. That got his back up. He downed his brandy, asked for another. He hadn’t touched alcohol since that last night with Lizzie and soon he remembered why; though the little blonde scrap he chose was cute and gentle as could be, he just felt angry at her, at himself, really, and she must have gotten scared and pressed a button or something because before too long he was outside with his pants in his hands, hunting for his other boot in the parking lot.

He tried to explain it to Davis. How he’d been a wild boy, too much for his broke-down mother. How he didn’t care to know about school or a trade, just wanted a big canvas for his young life and air that didn’t taste of sulfur, so he hopped a freight and never once looked back at the
smokestacks of Erie, Pennsylvania. By seventeen he was working the line at a salmon cannery in Bristol Bay, spending his pay in the bars and getting himself into every kind of trouble, which eventually added up to Lizzie, who was all of fourteen years old, half-blood native and crazier than he was. Took him in her mouth in the doorway of a warehouse on the docks and it was like a band started playing inside his skull. Before too long she was pregnant and then he really was in the shit because she had brothers and her father was some town big shot, more or less dragged the two of them to church just to save the family reputation. The old man hated Schmidt’s guts for obvious reasons but to do him justice he tried to be decent, set them up in a little place, even gave money for the kid. Catch was Schmidt didn’t like charity, and he certainly didn’t like to feel trapped, and because the little boy’s screams set him on edge and because he’d somehow lost his taste for her, he started slapping Lizzie around. Her menfolk warned him and each time it happened he cried in the girl’s lap and swore he’d do better, but the arguments only left him feeling sore and cornered, and then one night he drank more than usual and she talked back and somehow he ended up tying a noose round her neck and dragging her half a mile behind his truck before he came to his senses and hit the brake.

She survived, though she didn’t look the same after. In the lockup some boys held him down and messed with him and he thought they’d kill him because they said they’d been paid by Lizzie’s daddy, but they let up when they’d done their business and he pulled on his pants and lay down in a corner of his cell and was still lying there when the Russian came to bail him out. The Russian had owed him ever since Schmidt stopped him from putting some guy out of a third-floor window at the Friday-night card game. Think of all the years, said Schmidt, and the Russian, whiskey-deaf as he was, took heed. He was dangling the whimpering cheat by his ankles, about drunk enough to drop him, but instead he lifted him back in and gave him a couple of taps on the jaw and no more was said on the matter. Next morning when he sobered up he thanked Schmidt, said if he ever got into trouble he’d be there. The Russian’s two hundred bucks was Schmidt’s first stroke of luck. Second
was when the police chief turned up at the door and told him that if he left the Territory that same afternoon, Lizzie’s old man wouldn’t press charges. Reputation again. Worth more to him than his half-breed daughter, it appeared.

So Schmidt headed south, and though he tried to tough it out, told the story to men he worked or roomed with like it was some kind of joke, the guilt grew on him until it blotted out all happiness and he knew he’d kill himself unless he did something to get back right with the world. I’m just scum, he’d say to anyone who’d listen. Can’t help it, always been that way. And he thought he always would be, thought it was impossible to change, until he found out that
impossible is a word found only in the dictionary of fools
, which was a quotation, his first, the second being
If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you
, a saying he picked out of an old copy of
Reader’s Digest
and which gave him the notion, foreign to him until that time, that you could find truth in the written word. Thereafter he made a habit of seeking out such written truths and copying them down, first on scraps of paper, then in notebooks, until finally he realized he was working toward a system, such an understanding of the world as very few possessed. He read as much as he could, devoured books in every spare minute of his day, and never again touched liquor until Davis persuaded him into it, and only then out of some momentary wish to be like other people, a right he knew deep down he’d forfeited.

Davis listened to his story without saying a word. It was several weeks before he visited again.

Schmidt busied himself with signaling and watching the sky, plowing the furrow he’d started with those few scattered quotations. His search had led him first to the Bible, and then other books. He always suspected that any valuable truth would be hidden, that unless you had to dig for a thing, it wasn’t worth possessing. A year or two passed, and he’d found himself in Seattle, pushing a mop around the inside of a T-hangar as engineers worked on aircraft whose size and complexity seemed like a miracle. Watching the great machines take off and land, the way the Earth relinquished them and gently welcomed them back, he felt that
here was the secret made manifest. He decided to become a pilot, but when he went for a sight test, they told him he was astigmatic. That route was closed.

He went to the office and asked how to get a job as an aircraft mechanic. Technical school, replied the manager, and soon Schmidt was taking classes during the day and working nights as a security guard. By the time the war in Europe started, he had a steady job at Boeing Field and a bungalow full of books, their margins blackened by his spidery writing. The shape of his project was becoming clear: how to connect the mysteries of technology with those of the spirit. He knew the aircraft he worked on—with their tangled skeins of electrical cable, their hydraulics, their finely calibrated gauges that monitored fuel levels and engine power—were only half the story. There were forces greater and more intangible than thrust and torque and lift. It had fallen to him to unify them. Perhaps when he was brought before his maker, he would be judged not as a monster but as a bringer of light, a good man.

After Pearl Harbor he was reassigned to the XB-29 project, rushing out a new long-range bomber for use against the Japanese. The schedule was punishing. The aircraft had all kinds of problems, overheating engines, mysterious electrical faults that took days to trace. One day a test pilot lost control of a prototype, crashing through a power line into a nearby packing plant. The ground crew jumped into trucks and cars and drove toward the burning building, trying to get close enough to the wreckage to see if anyone could be saved. Thirty people died.

The engine problems wouldn’t go away, and once the bomber went into production just about every part the plants churned out was defective. The generals wanted the planes in China to start operations, but on the date they were due to leave, not a single one was ready. Schmidt was posted to Wichita, working double shifts in a snowstorm, overseeing a crew performing final mods on the navigation system. They had to turn around every twenty minutes, because that was the longest anyone could stay outside before frostbite set in. At last the planes started flying east, only to be grounded in Egypt when the engines, which had more or less worked at freezing point, started malfunctioning in the hundred-and-twenty-degree heat. Schmidt was sent out to retrofit new baffles
and a cooling system, designed more or less on the fly by a team working out of a hangar at the Cairo airfield.

The B-29s limped on; Schmidt went with them. Cockpit temperatures climbed to a hundred and seventy, then fell to minus twenty over the Himalayas as the airframes were tested almost to destruction by violent downdrafts and side winds that threw the giant planes around like balsawood toys. He peered through the clouds and caught glimpses of valleys and gorges, rivers, villages, every so often the bright unnerving gleam of aluminum wreckage on the black mountainsides. Something protected him, and a week after flying over the hump he was standing on the tarmac at Hsinching. Peasants straightened up from their paddies at the airfield’s edge, shielding their eyes to watch ninety bombers of the 58th Wing take off on their way to the Showa steelworks in Anshan. He was almost hallucinating with tiredness, having spent the previous forty-eight hours field-modding the big Wright Cyclone engines, trying to stop the cascade of horrors that unfolded when things went wrong in midair: valve heads flying off and chewing up the cylinders, tiny leaks of hydraulic fluid that could prevent the pilot from feathering a stalled prop, so that it started to drag and then sheared off, or worse, seized up the whole engine, which then twisted right out of the wing. The planes looked like huge white birds, like angels. He felt a sort of queasy elation. He was atoning; he was helping win the war.

In early ’45 they moved forward operations to the Mariana Islands. On Guam, Schmidt spent his breaks sitting in a deck chair by the enlisted men’s mess at North Field, reading
Isis Unveiled
in an edition he’d bought from a Theosophical bookshop in Calcutta. Beyond the perimeter, out in the jungle, were wild animals and half-feral Japanese who’d been stranded when the Imperial Army evacuated. He, on the other hand, was out in the open, in the clear. For the first time in years he allowed himself to feel happy. He heard from aircrew about the incendiary raids, and somehow that didn’t touch him, but then he was transferred to Tinian. The 509th Composite acted like they were the second coming, strutting around as if they owned the whole Pacific and everyone else ought to pay them for the privilege of using it. Rumor was they were testing some new superweapon; as he watched the
Enola Gay
take off for
Hiroshima, Schmidt knew it wasn’t carrying the standard payload, but that was all. Like the rest of the world, he found out through pictures: the burned children, the watches stopped at 8:15. His beautiful gleaming aircraft, the harbingers of light, had been used to unleash darkness. He’d been betrayed.

By the fall of ’46 he was back in Seattle but couldn’t settle into the routine of civilian work. The world seemed to be sliding toward some terrible new evil. The spiritual promise of energy had been perverted: Instead of abolishing poverty and hunger, atomic power would turn the planet into a wasteland. Unable to face going outside, he began to neglect his work. The bungalow was cold and damp. In the evenings he sat in front of the fire and shivered until he fell asleep, imagining the tall conifers outside the window closing in and blotting out the sky.

He quit before they could fire him, withdrew his savings from the bank, packed his library and his papers into his ’38 Ford pickup and headed for the desert. In his mind he saw himself as one of the prophets of old, an ascetic sitting cross-legged in a cave. He would mortify his body, purify his mind. The world had split in two, either side of the Iron Curtain. He would heal the wound. His intention was to summon the only force powerful enough to transcend Communism and Capitalism and halt the cascade of destructive energies. Since the dawn of history there had been contact with extraterrestrial intelligences. Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels, the Mayan space pilots, the cosmic weaponry of Vedic India—the visitors possessed a spiritual technology far in advance of the crude mechanisms of earth science. It was time for them to manifest themselves, to intervene in the lives of men.

So he sent out his invitation. Two hours a night—two hours to atone for Lizzie, for the bombing raids, for all the misery of existence on Earth. As he scanned the skies, he saw many things: meteor showers, bright lights moving in formation over the Tehachapi Mountains. Sometimes military jets flew overhead, threading vapor trails through the blue.