OPUS 21 (38 page)

The colonel crawled--gnawed by claustrophobia. He pushed his chute ahead in the dim tube--because that was regulations. He wished he had chosen to drag it, instead. The thing stuck. He lunged up over it and his ribs came in contact with the curved top of the tunnel. He was half-jammed there. Sweat broke out on him--he tried to breathe--his ribs hurt. He could yell--they could get a rope around his foot and haul him back. He inched clear of the chute--pushed it forward, and went on more slowly, struggling now with the afreets of panic--putting them down like mutineers, savagely.

Now he thought of the bomb bay--the oblong maw atop which he fought his way.

Big as a freight car. Big as two garages set end to end. Big enough to hold--how many horses? A dozen? And what did it contain?

His sweat dried up. His skin pimpled. Coldness seemed to flush the tube as coldness flushes a belly into which ice water has been gulped. Was the air here invisibly alive? Did uranium exude invisible, lethal rays--like radium? Or did it lie inert--in uncritical masses of unknown sizes (but not big)--waiting for union?

He went on. When, at last, his head appeared at the far end of the tunnel he wore, again, his placid fighting smile.

The top CFC man dawdled in his swivel chair. The two blister gunners nodded and looked back into the neutral nothing of their provinces. The third chap smiled softly.

Colonel Calm came down the ladder, stretched, picked up his chute familiarly, and went on to the radar room. It was, he thought, glancing back at the tunnel opening, hardly bigger than a torpedo tube. The craft in many ways resembled a submarine, when you thought about it.

There were four men in the radar room. Two at tables. One squatting, rocking with the plane's slight motion; and one stretched on the Army cot. He saw the colonel.

"'Shun!" he bawled.

"At ease, for God's sake!" Colonel Calm went to an old man who stared into the hood of a scope with the fascinated pleasure of a child seeing his first stereopticon slides.

"Well, doctor? How is it going?"

Sopho glanced up--and he smiled, too. That was the thing about the colonel's mouth and eyes: you saw and you also smiled. Even when the kamikaze had connected, when Number 3 engine was on fire-pluming smoke and the CO2 wasn't making headway, when flak splashed black flowers on the morning, when tracers rose like tennis balls, the deck was slick with gunners' blood, and when the inadequate, high, freezing air whistled through the ship--scaling fast, bits of plexiglass. Even then, he smiled--and you smiled back--and went on.

"Wonderful gadget," Dr. Sopho said, pointing to the hood, within which the colonel could see a scanning light--streak and the radiant wake, following and fading perpetually. "After this trip," the scientist went on, "maybe we can go back to work. Real work. Maybe--" he pointed at the scope--"use that for saving a few lives, instead."

"Hope so." The colonel thought of his tedious wife--of weary years in Washington--desiccated military establishments in Texas--the drain and drag of peacetime. "Hope so," he lied. "Everything set?"

Sopho grinned. "Hope so."

"There's a chance of a dud--?"

"Some. Partial dud, anyhow."

The colonel seemed agitated. "In that case, wouldn't they get the secret?"

The old man had a goatee. He reached for it. "Yes. Yes, they might. And spend the next twenty years trying to put one together."

Colonel Calm continued down a narrow passage and opened a small door.

Freckles Mahoney was taking his ease at the breeches of his tail guns--rocked back--

staring at the vault where the powdery light was least. Daydreaming of a gum-chewing, short-haired, underbreasted Kalamazoo High School babe--and keeping his eyes peeled.

The door shut.

The colonel nerved himself for the return passage. Worse than being born--so far as he could remember. Dragging a placenta of parachute and harness through an aluminum canal with an atomic bomb beneath. He gave the three gunners his smile and they did not know it was--this time a smile of fighting himself. At any rate, he thought, after one more crawl through eternity he could stay in the control compartment, forward.

Unless Sopho wanted him.

He took hold of the ladder, sighted through the black tube to freedom's eye at the far end--and his blood turned to water.

Three men besides the gunners? He felt horror between his shoulder blades--gun, knife, and worse. He checked crew and passengers.

He pretended to be untangling his chute straps, preparing to go through the round-eyed hell. Jordan on the top blister. Smith left, here. White right--and the unknown man beside him. No visible rank. Coveralls--insignia worn or torn off. Bearded like a submariner or the men he had relieved on Guadal. Hawk nose, brown eyes--

extraordinarily intelligent, too-firm mouth, a gentle, definitely civilian look. Never saw him before.

This, the colonel realized, was obviously impossible.

He'd trained the crew, himself--picked each man, with special help from Headquarters-and met all the passengers weeks ago--old Sopho last--but, still-weeks ago.

Each member of the company-cleared, checked, quadruple-checked, traced by G2

back through every childhood peccadillo, back through generations. Truman himself couldn't have got a man on board without the colonel's okay--his invitation and acquaintance.

He felt sick and feeble; he clung to the ladder under the tunnel mouth and staggered as the B-29 dived ponderously through a downdraft. Some last-minute thing, he decided; certainly the impossible passenger did not appear to be dangerous. One could not look at him and think of sabotage at the same time. These bloody, accursed, God-damned scientists! Very Important Person--he looked every inch a VIP--a VIP in science, not military affairs. No bearing to speak of--and that kindly smile at the corners of that mouth.

Last-minute stuff.

It would be assumed the colonel knew--but his fourway check had slipped.

When he returned to base-chevrons would fall. Lieutenants, captains, majors would drop back a grade.

See who he is.

The colonel went over to Smith, squatted.

"Skipper!" Smith said, returning the smile, the Air Force treasure.

The ship thrummed. Buzzed. Hummed. Ate air. Hurried toward the enemy islands.

Colonel Calm feigned to look from the blister. He supposed he saw, in the gray below, the corrugations of the Pacific, and above, the pearly heavens, the solid stretch of wing, the streamlined engine-housing. They were there, at least.

"The man with White. His name. Can't think of it."

"Chris."

"Chris what?"

Smith seemed embarrassed. "All I know. He came through the tunnel half an hour ago. 'Call me Chris,' he said. And he said, 'Mind if I sit?' "

The smile was a mask. He could keep it on his face even now. Eyes lighted up by the battery of will, corners crinkled, lips relaxed, a human twitch of the nose--man-loving, disdainful of blood and death, enemy and calamity. He could.

Came through the tunnel.

The man had not been in the control cabin, to begin with.

No bearded man.

No--Chris.

The colonel turned on his bent toes, the stranger watching. Should he jump the guy? Tell Smith to dive in with him? Go back for a pistol and shoot from the tunnel? The man smiled pleasantly. Colonel Calm stood up, went round the post and track--the high barber's chair--and the gear and machinery that subtended the gunner in the top blister.

"Hi," the colonel said.

"Wonderful--a ship like this!"

"I've forgotten your last name."

"Chris."

"Oh. I don't believe I've had the pleasure--?"

The man held out his hand. "We've met. It was long ago, though."

Colonel Calm had the momentary sensation of remembering. Seen him somewhere--that's a fact.

Chris was smiling. "My being along was arranged late."

"I see."

"You'll want to look over my papers, perhaps? My orders, I should say."

"Yeah. White House stuff?"

The man shrugged. "Pretty high up, I'll admit." He began unbuttoning his coveralls. The colonel wished the man would stop looking so directly at him. Powerful eyes--like a lot of those scientific birds. They could, with a glance, give you an impotent sensation--a feeling that you weren't in command at all. A feeling that they commanded a force which could outlast you and would defeat you in the end. They made you feel--

Christ bite them!--like a tin soldier, sometimes. And yet--high up. VIP. This was a trick mission--the trickiest of the war. You couldn't afford to make a fool of yourself. "Never mind," the colonel said. "My major probably checked you in--and forgot to mention it.

The strain--"

"I know your major, yes. Sad."

"Sad? Greatest flying officer who ever took a plane off a base!"

"Cold-blooded."

"Right! Veins full of liquid helium. Have to be!"

"Have to be? Perhaps. I always hesitated--though--to think of men as numbers."

The colonel felt relieved. Major Waite's discussion of flight plans--his harangues in the briefing rooms--sometimes left the colonel a little chilled. Emptied-out. Obviously this Chris knew the major. He wasn't--fantastically--impossibly--an agent of the enemy.

Now the colonel gestured toward the bomb bay--the radioactive uterus of the plane.

"You--helped put it together?"

The man seemed to grow pale. His smile disappeared.

"No."

"Then what--? In God's name what--?"

"I am here," Chris said in so low a tone his voice scarcely carried through the pulsing air, "because I promised."

"Promised? Promised who--when--?"

"Because I said it. Lo, I shall be with you always, even unto the end of the world."

The colonel stared--and remembered. He turned the color of ashes. His right hand, ungoverned, made upon brow, shoulders and chest the sign of the Cross. His knees bent tremblingly.

But before he could genuflect the man called Chris touched his arm. "Don't, colonel!"

The officer, in his distraction, was muttering a woman's name, over and over.

Chris smiled painfully. "I am here." He glanced, then, at the watching gunners.

The colonel looked that way, too, and recovered something of his fighting smile.

They were--after all--his command. It wouldn't do to let them see him prostrate. The gunners responded to the direct glance--and the return of the smile--by a brightening of their eyes and a faint curving of the corners of their mouths; their attention went back to duty--the duty of scanning the void outside the domes of plexiglass.

"My Lord--" the colonel all but whispered--"what shall we do?"

"Return."

The soldier's eyes faltered. "Abort the mission!"

"I hoped I might persuade you."

"Another would merely follow--!"

"And them."

"But--duty!"

"To whom is duty?"

A head appeared in the round mouth of the tunnel. Learned, the journalist, grinned like an imp. "Nasty crawl," he yelled. "Hope they've got that thing well insulated.

Otherwise--I'm unsexed--or hotter than radium myself!" He saw the stranger, and halfway down on the ladder stood still. His eyes, ordinarily shrewd and compassionate, showed first a little amazement--and then twinkled. "A ringer! You would pull one like that, colonel! The American press wants to know who he is!" Learned chuckled and dropped to the metal floor. Strode the two steps forward. Gave his name. Held out his hand. Explained himself. "You're a physicist, I take it?"

"My name is Chris." The dark eyes were luminous and kind.

"Chris who?"

The colonel took the journalist's arm in a hand like steel and whispered.

Learned, also, grew pale. He stared first at the colonel and then, uneasily, he eyed the stranger. Twice, the gleam of sardonic doubt shone. And twice, with all his will and concentration, he endeavored to make some satirical reply: to say, skeptically, that this would be the greatest interview in two millenniums.

Or to ask how things were in the Blue Up Yonder.

He failed. He--too--abruptly knew. The resources of his training abandoned him--

left but the residue of naked personality. His tongue circled his lips. He gave the stranger another uncertain glance, a hopeful glance--and suddenly, on the impulse, took out his cigarettes and offered them.

Chris shook his head. "Thanks, Learned."

"Do you mind--"

"Of course not."

Now the journalist and the colonel shakily fumbled with cigarettes and the wavering flame of a match.

Chris had turned. He was looking expectantly toward the narrow door that led to the radar room and from it, presently, Sopho came. "Thought I'd run a counter through the tunnel," he began. "Check things." He saw Chris. "Hello! Didn't realize I hadn't met the ship's full complement."

The colonel and the reporter watched.

"My name is Chris, doctor."

"Can't place you. The Chicago Group, perhaps, didn't meet them all."

"No."

"Army, then? White House? OSS? I'm a physicist. Sopho's the name."

"This man," said Learned, in a hoarse, uneven voice his ears had never heard before, "comes from--another place." He told the physicist.

Dr. Sopho's right thumb and forefinger touched his small beard. Across the back of his hand--tanned to leather by his long residence in the desert--skin pimpled and the reddish hairs rose. The tiny phenomenon passed--passed like the eddy of air that dimples still water and disappears. His great head with the thin nose and the straight, exaggerate brow bent forward attentively. He was searching the stranger for obvious signs of madness. It became apparent that he found none.

"Incredible," he murmured.

"You do not believe me?"

The scientist shook his head. "My dear fellow--I do not even believe
in
you. So--

naturally--" He turned with abruptness to the colonel. "How did he get aboard? His papers?" He now saw the colonel's frantic, imploring eyes. "Great God, man--you don't accept--?"

"It's the truth," Colonel Calm responded.