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language! January choked back a laugh. Don t curse or blaspheme God at the
sight of the first atomic bomb incinerating a city and all its inhabitants
with X rays!
Six-twenty. January found his hands clenched together on the headrest of the
bombsight. He felt as if he had a fever. In the harsh wash of morning light
the skin on the backs of his hands appeared slightly translucent. The whorls
in the skin looked like the delicate patterning of waves on the sea s surface.
His hands were made of atoms. Atoms were the smallest building block of
matter, it took billions of them to make those tense, trembling hands. Split
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one atom and you had the fireball. That meant that the energy contained in
even one hand . . . he turned up a palm to look at the lines and the mottled
flesh under the transparent skin. A person was a bomb that could blow up the
world.
January felt that latent power stir in him, pulsing with every hard
heart-knock. What beings they were, and in what a blue expanse of a world! And
here they spun on to drop a bomb and kill a hundred thousand of these
astonishing beings.
When a fox or raccoon is caught by the leg in a trap, it lunges until the leg
is frayed, twisted, perhaps broken, and only then does the animal s pain and
exhaustion force it to quit. Now in the same way January wanted to quit. His
mind hurt. His plans to escape were so much crap stupid, useless. Better to
quit. He tried to stop thinking, but it was hopeless. How could he stop? As
long as he was conscious he would be thinking. The mind struggles longer in
its traps than any fox.
Lucky Strike tilted up and began the long climb to bombing altitude. On the
horizon the clouds lay over a green island. Japan. Surely it had gotten
hotter, the heater must be broken, he thought. Don t think. Every few minutes
Matthews gave Fitch small course adjustments. Two seventy-five, now.
That s it. To escape the moment January recalled his childhood. Following a
mule and plow.
Moving to Vicksburg (rivers). For a while there in Vicksburg, since his
stutter made it hard to gain friends, he had played a game with himself. He
had passed the time by imagining that everything he did was vitally important
and determined the fate of the world. If he crossed a road in front of a
certain car, for instance, then the car wouldn t make it through the next
intersection before a truck hit it, and so the man driving would be killed and
wouldn t be able to invent the flying boat that would save President Wilson
from kidnappers so he had to wait for that car because everything afterward
depended on it. Oh damn it, he thought, damn it, think of something different
. The last
Hornblower story he had read how would get out of this? The round O of his
mother s face as he she ran in and saw his arm The Mississippi, mud-brown
behind its levees Abruptly he shook his head, face twisted in frustration and
despair, aware at last that no possible avenue of memory would serve as an
escape for him now, for now there was no part of his life that did not apply
to the situation he was in, and no matter where he cast his mind it was going
to shore up against the hour facing him.
Less than an hour. They were at thirty thousand feet, bombing altitude. Fitch
gave him altimeter readings to dial into the bombsight. Matthews gave him
windspeeds. Sweat got in his eye and he blinked furiously. The sun rose behind
them like an atomic bomb, glinting off every corner and edge of the Plexiglas,
illuminating his bubble compartment with a fierce glare. Broken plans jumbled
together in his mind, his breath was short, his throat dry. Uselessly and
repeatedly he damned the scientists, damned Truman. Damned the Japanese for
causing the whole mess in the first place, damned yellow killers, they had
brought this on themselves. Remember Pearl. American men had died under bombs
when no war had been declared; they had started it and now it was coming back
to them with a vengeance. And they deserved it. And an invasion of Japan would
take years, cost millions of lives end it now, end it, they deserved it, they
deserved it steaming river full of charcoal people silently dying damned
stubborn race of maniacs!
There s Honshu, Fitch said, and January returned to the world of the plane.
They were over the
Inland Sea. Soon they would pass the secondary target, Kokura, a bit to the
south. Seven-thirty. The island was draped more heavily than the sea by
clouds, and again January s heart leaped with the idea that weather would
cancel the mission. But they did deserve it. It was a mission like any other
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