Trinity's Child (43 page)

Halupalai slowly turned his head, fastening big and mournful eyes on Kazaklis. The eyes blinked once, transmitting the briefest subliminal message of the kind that could pass only between friends. It said: Stop the con, Kazaklis. Then the eyes went balefully blank again and the pilot's heart sank. “Get your ass up front, sergeant,” Kazaklis said with quiet firmness.

Halupalai smiled faintly, almost unnoticeably. “Where you gonna go, commander?”

The question had an eerie ring, and it sent an alarm through Kazaklis. But he forced the super-con, Boom-Room Room smile anyway, tightened his brotherly grip on Halupalai's taut neck, and said cheerily, “You can pick the island, beachboy.” Kazaklis felt Halupalai's tendons grow tighter.

“I didn't mean to hurt him,” the gunner whispered, haunted.

“I know, pal,” Kazaklis said. “I know, I know.” He took Halupalai by both arms and pulled him away from the wall.

Kazaklis watched as Halupalai moved toward the cockpit, edging his way in a crab-walk, his back to the bulkhead, his arms still outstretched to feel his way, his eyes held unseeing far above the form beneath him. He saw Halupalai lower himself uneasily into the pilot's seat and reach out tentatively to touch the one-fingered glove. Then Kazaklis went about his business, which was body stacking. Kazaklis struggled to get Tyler's corpse down the narrow ladder, thinking briefly of simply dropping it, and then, out of respect, dismissing the thought and doing it the hard way. At the bottom he dragged the limp heap, trying to avoid looking at the lolling head, and placed the navigator next to O'Toole. Then he moved Radnor, building a bleak pyramid in the narrow space leading to the sealed chamber holding their remaining bombs. He turned and went to Tyler's seat. He sat down, and for no reason, sorted out the mess, stacking the jumbled papers, wetting his fingers and trying to erase the now dried spatters of blood. His eyes fastened unexpectedly on the hallowed Kodak print, a little boy staring round-eyed and worshipfully at him.

Suddenly he felt exhausted. He laid his head down on Tyler's desktop and drifted into a fitful half-sleep. He saw Sarah Jean— rah! rah!—her breasts now tight little mailed fists flouncing beneath a soft sweater, her hand reaching toward his groin, clasping, pulling at a red lever. Nikko turned scrawny and old, taunting him with a lightning-bolt tongue. A little boy shivered in the rain, scrounging among the beetles, digging the life-giving pitch out of rotting hulks in a primeval swamp, feeding his precious find to the giant insects, and the pterodactyls devoured the white capsules he offered, swooped over the rubble of his splintered forest, arched triumphantly over the pulverized cities of his adulthood, their giant wings shrouds now, casting widening shadows as they dived into a flawless crater in which Halupalai lofted a perfect pass and Moreau leaped as the spheroid soared higher and farther—rah! rah!—and a little boy placed a match to a perfect tepee frame of the bulbous gray firewood the world had given him, and he built a fire in the rain.

“They'll shoot you, general.”

“Sam.” Alice looked deeply into the troubled face of his colleague, seeing great pain, which he appreciated, and great doubt, which he understood. “Sam, I should find such an angel of mercy.”

The general turned briefly away, reached into the satchel at his side, and withdrew the special-issue revolver he had carried since he won his first star. He looked at it fondly. It was a general officer's tool never used. He felt every eye in the
Looking Glass
on him now, but he had no sense of embarrassment at all.

“You know, Sam,” Alice said thoughtfully, “they tell us at West Point that every war is made up of a million private wars. They tell us only once, because no officer likes it that way. Not very disciplined, private wars.” He paused and sighed. “I've just fought mine. As God is my witness, I don't know if I won or lost.”

“Ten of our bombers, general,” Sam said quietly. “What does it mean? You can't call back the submarines. You can't hold the rest of the world together.” The voice turned beseeching and Alice knew that Sam's war was raging now. “It won't change anything, general.”

“Change anything?” Alice sounded detached, even to himself. “I don't believe that's what private wars are all about, Sam.”

Alice felt the finely etched security of the gun handle in his palm. Then he flipped the weapon neatly, catching it by the barrel, and placed it atop the code box. He stood, perfectly erect, and held unflinching eyes on his friend and subordinate.

“I just gave you an order, Sam,” he said firmly. “Just disobeyed one, too. First in more than thirty years. I'm tired. I'm going back to lie down.” He started to turn. “I'll understand, warrior,” he added. Then he walked out of the compartment, into the aircraft's rear cabin, and lay down on its single cot, his back turned toward a doorway intentionally left open.

“It wasn't your fault, good friend,” Moreau said in a voice that washed over Halupalai in the same massaging rhythm of the airplane's vibrations, the same rhythm of her fingers.

Halupalai was unaccustomed to the front seat and equally unaccustomed to the comfort of a woman's hand. When he first came up front, he had said nothing. Then he had begun to babble, gushing all the guilt of a lifetime at the woman kneading his shoulders. But now he sensed that Moreau was having no easier time than he. That added to his guilt, but he tried to pull himself together.

“I didn't mean it to be that way with Tyler,” he said, painfully firming up his voice.

Moreau looked at him in anguish. Halupalai had sensed correctly that she was having trouble, and not simply with the task of calming him. “You saved us,” she said. The words sounded hollow, even to her. In some unfathomable way, she was finding the turnabout run more difficult than the plunge into Russia. They had programmed her to die, not to live, not to deal with the new problems of surviving. She tried to finish her thought. “Tyler went crazy.”

Halupalai looked at her with a strange childlike expression. “Is it all right to kill crazy people now?” The look on Moreau's face turned from anguish to raw pain. Halupalai floundered. He wanted away from the subject. He wanted to tell her something else, but he didn't know how.

“Moreau . . . ?”

She sighed and squeezed his shoulder lightly.

“Moreau,” he continued tentatively, “you shouldn't fight with Kazaklis all the time. He's really okay.”

Moreau's fingers tightened noticeably on his shoulder, but he went on.

“He's got a side he never lets you see.”

She said nothing.

“Please, Moreau. It's important.”

“I know,” Moreau finally replied. “We've all got that side, Halupalai.”

“Please,” he insisted.

She stared hard into Halupalai's open face. He sounded as if he were writing his will. She shivered, and then she nodded and patted his shoulder reassuringly. He smiled. They both went silent, each into a separate world, and Moreau felt the shame and guilt well up, only to be replaced by fear—a great fear of a new unknown. Until now her future had been ordained and simple— a robot pilot's death in the death of a doomed world. It no longer was quite that simple, and the simplicity suddenly seemed cleaner, preferable. What kind of void was she entering now, with what kind of shadow of a man? Could she survive in this new wilderness? Did she want to survive? Did she want to walk into the new emptiness with a man whose other side she had never seen? She shuddered, realizing shamefully that her mind had cut Halupalai out of that world. She reached for him. But he was gone, having shuffled silently back to his proper place in the dark redness. She was very afraid. Where was Kazaklis? He seemed to have been gone forever.

Sedgwick felt something jabbing at him. He didn't want to awaken. He was very comfortably, sleepily cold. He brushed at the irritant, the pain from his hands racking him out of his grogginess. His hands hurt more than his broken legs now. Near him he heard brush crackle, snow crunch, as something suddenly withdrew from him.

“You soldier?” a frightened, squeaky voice asked.

Sedgwick forced his eyes open. The light had changed to the difficult shadows of a murky false dawn. Or perhaps the fires had moved closer. He had trouble focusing his eyes. He saw a small form pulling away through the winter-barren skeletons of the underbrush.

“Don't go!” Sedgwick pleaded, stretching a bloodied hand outward.

“You American?” the voice asked suspiciously.

Sedgwick forced his eyes to focus and saw a young boy, perhaps eight years old, black and cherub-faced. The boy backed slowly away, holding a stick in defense.

“Don't go,” Sedgwick said again. “Please.”

“Soldiers nuked us.”

“Get your daddy. Please.”

“M' daddy's dead.”

“Please, boy”—don't call him boy, Sedgwick, you klutz—”please get someone. Your mama.” Sedgwick's head was swimming, pain overwhelming desperation, then desperation overwhelming pain. “The President is down there.” The boy said nothing. Sedgwick despaired at the very absurdity of what he had said, and he began to slip away again, his mind fuzzily telling him not even a child could believe him. “Your mama,” he whimpered one more time, his head falling back into the snow.

“M' mama doan like the President.”

Sedgwick lifted his head and reached out again—and the Queen said to Alice: Why, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast—but the boy was gone. Sedgwick slipped back into semiconsciousness at the top of the gully up which he had pulled himself hand over hand.

Kazaklis snapped abruptly out of his nightmare, sitting bolt upright in Tyler's seat. For a moment he was disoriented, the claustrophobic red lights closing in on him, his head swaying ever so slightly with the radar arm in front of him. The arm swept over a tongue of land, which they were departing, then over ice-free sea, and then, in the distance, over the ragged coastline of a fairly large island. He looked at his watch: 1225 Zulu. He shook his head, not remembering precisely when he had come downstairs. “Where the hell are we?” he bellowed. In the mirror reflection of the screen he could see the faint outline of the bodies stacked behind him, a pyre glowing in the redness. “Where the hell are we?” he shouted again. No answer. He felt very alone. He shuddered and stood, starting to unhook his radio connection. Then he sagged back in the seat, cursing himself. Anybody would go nuts down here. The radio wire hung loosely, never having been connected as he completed his grim chores. He attached it to 
Tyler's outlet and, a trifle sheepishly, asked: “Where the hell are we?”

Moreau's voice cut icily into his earphones. “You seem to like navigating, commander. You tell me.”

How long had he been down here? Ten minutes? Twenty? Thirty? He would have been furious with anyone else. “How's our friend?” he asked defensively.

“Spooked,” Moreau spat back. “Do you mind coming back up here? We do have some problems.” He started to snap at her— this had not been the night's most pleasant assignment—but Moreau continued. “See if you can snitch Halupalai's alert bag on the way by.”

Kazaklis heard the radio click off abruptly. A pang of fear rippled through the pilot. He rose quickly, unhooked, and took one last look around. He did not want to come down here again. His eyes halted on Timmie. Reverently he pulled the photo loose from its simple plastic-tape frame. He walked to the alcove, tucked the photo into Tyler's flight-jacket pocket, and zipped the pocket shut. Then he hurried up the ladder.

Halupalai sat inertly with his back to the stairwell. Kazaklis reached quickly for the bag, placing it behind his back, and squeezed the gunner's shoulder. Halupalai woodenly turned a now ancient face toward him. The big Hawaiian's hollow eyes slowly dropped toward the half-hidden alert bag, then moved knowingly back up at Kazaklis. He shook his head slightly, as if to tell Kazaklis it was foolish to worry about the cyanide pill, even more foolish to worry about the .45. The pilot clenched Halupalai's shoulder once more and moved up front.

“Welcome back,” Moreau said acidly, forgetting her unspoken promise to Halupalai.

Kazaklis ignored her. “He doesn't seem any better.”

“He's blaming himself for everything from Vietnam to Radnor's wife.”

“Jesus.”

“Shoulda known O'Toole was freezing to death. Shoulda tapped Tyler on the shoulder and asked for the damned gun. Shoulda shot down some bloody SAM's fifteen years ago in Vietnam. Shoulda this, shoulda that, shoulda, shoulda, shoulda!” Moreau was beginning to sound hysterical.

“Hey, take it easy, pal.”

“Take it easy, bullshit! Everybody's going bonkers! You disap
pear, Halupalai babbles, the world's committing fucking suicide. Dammit . . .” Moreau's voice trailed off.

Kazaklis softly placed a hand on her shoulder. She shook uncontrollably from rage and frustration.

“Get your damned hands off me!” she shrieked. “Go back downstairs and jack off—or whatever the hell you were doing. That's all the world's been doing for forty years.” Her voice sagged again. “You deserve each other.”

“Hey, Moreau,” he protested feebly.

“Then help me, Kazaklis. Play your silly percentage baseball. Give it your fancy barroom hustle. Do something. Anything. But don't mope and don't disappear for half an hour.” She paused and slumped in her seat. “Halupalai says there's a side of you I don't see,” she said quietly.