The Ninth Wave

by Eugene Burdick

  In due time, the eager scientists assembled the contents of the boxes into a long metal capsule of censored length and breadth and censored weight. They deposited it beside the airfield and the young fliers stopped eating their Spam sandwiches, and drinking powdered lemonade and whisky and brought their plane up close to the long dun-colored capsule. They were languid and calm, uninterested as the scientists hovered about the bored ordnance men who trundled the capsule out to the plane and finally snuggled it up into the belly of the B-29. And there the sperm and ova of the new thing lay; separated by a few inches of lead, but firmly planted in the stomach of the plane with her four 2200-horsepower engines and lead-computing sights, and stabilizers, and pressurized cabins and masses of instruments.

  The young scientists retired to the edge of the runway and squatted on their heels. A few of them climbed into a second B-29. The first plane turned slowly, aimed itself down the runway, and with a long smooth roar was finally airborne. The second plane followed it. The two planes turned north and, switching to automatic, began the flight for Japan.

  The world wheeled by under the plane; the sea, an occasional speck of an island, once a task force and finally the perfect lip of the horizon was smeared, and then they saw the edge of Japan rising out of the ocean. There was fog over the first target and so, without the people below knowing, with a godly indifference, the plane turned and made for another city. The city came to shape in the bombardier's sight. Far away and microscopic, he saw the thin black squares, the parks, the broad line of the river. The bombardier's fingers worked the knobs; wind drift, plane speed, real wind, etc. His sights were not strong enough to see people, so that when he squeezed the button and let the capsule fall away in a long slanting spin, he only hoped that it would fall exactly in the middle of the mosaic of lines and blocks. He put on the thick black glasses given him by the scientists and pressed against a window of the plane. The two planes were shaken as if a massive tuning fork were vibrating inside of them. Through the thick black lens a flicker of light penetrated.

  Below the airplane, the tiny particles had come together in a rupturing of heat and light. The light burnt hot on Japanese bodies. Some of the Japanese were killed in the old way by flying stones and bashing their heads against walls or being buried in collapsing walls. But many were killed in a new strange way and simply stood and died gasping for air like landed fish. In a fraction of a second people grew huge blisters on their faces and hands. In some people the marrow of their bones dried suddenly and produced no more corpuscles so that later they died from a cold or a cut finger. But there was the comfort of enormity about it, the solace of common disaster, the stability of ignorance. The shattered burnt bodies nursed crisper, more broken bodies in a nightmare of pus-filled eyes, skinless hands, dust-filled skies and a scarcity of water.

  Lines of people walked by looking as if they had been dipped in slime that had hardened slowly. "Look, they are in lines again," an old man, squatting by the road, said. Others took up the cry. "Look, lines again. They walk in correct lines," and suddenly all the wounded people felt better.

  "Good stuff," the crewman of the plane remarked. They took off their dark glasses and began to tend the plane again. "Mighty good stuff. New stuff, eh?"

  The young scientists were pressed against the windows, their black glasses off and their eyes startled and childlike. They watched the shattered cloud of dust around the ground, heaving and swirling in brown waves. Suddenly, out of the brown murk a pure white column climbed clean and untarnished into the sky. At fifteen thousand feet it suddenly spurted a pure and lovely mushroom further into the sky. It was as clean and solid as marble, clear against the blue of the sky.

  The youngest of the scientists felt his breath stop and a queer exultation seized him. He dug his fingers against the sides of the plane for support and his body was caught in a slow grinding orgasm as the perfect column split the. sky. Minutes later when the wind had begun to shatter the sides of the column and the mushroom was starting to lose its sharp clarity, he pushed himself away from the side of the plane as if every muscle in his body had been broken and hurried back to the tiny lavatory at the rear of the plane.

  Then, by some widespread and common agreement, the endless lines and waves of men hesitated and paused and stopped fighting. The rest of it was all done by words spoken by diplomats and statesmen.

  No one was ready for it.

  Now the huge brown wave of equipment and khaki started to roll backward, starting slowly and then gradually speeding up, like a wide-lensed camera suddenly beginning to run in reverse. The wave left behind it a rusty iron fringe; the keen cutting edge began to corrode and rot. There were tanks slowly turning red, quonset huts overrun by jungle, stacks of rotting food in which a few pot-bellied natives and slim dashing parakeets picked, beer cans melting into the mud. The long white strips of airfields grew a fuzz of green that thickened and then finally swallowed the asphalt and cement completely. The temporary docks rotted and sank into the ocean. The only orderly thing left in the rich tropical chaos was the trim rows of white crosses, row on row, marvelously neat and well laid out.

  The men and boys making up the great wave went backward through the whole process, but somehow the system worked poorly in reverse, the men changed back slowly and reluctantly. They went through the reception centers, and separation centers and interviews and were handed their manila envelopes and turned loose. They put on flannel suits, corduroys, overalls, blue business suits, sport coats, truck driver uniforms, but in all of them there was the great sameness. The sameness did not come from fighting, for even the men who sat on their buttocks for the entire war with their feet on a desk had it. Cooks, telephone operators, control tower men, transport pilots, radarmen, signalmen, they all had it. It was a way of holding the head and opening the mouth to bitch and looking at women and filling out papers and jealously guarding tiny areas of privilege, and part of it was a childish petulance, and part of it was getting old too fast, and part of it was the loneliness that men feel in a mob. But no man could tell another about the sameness, and it took weeks and months for it to disappear. Maybe the sameness disappeared when they stopped eating the same starchy food that gave them plump faces or when they stopped marching in column when they walked alone. But somehow the great sameness did vanish, somehow all the men began to function on their own nerves and brains again and in each man there was a day when he realized that the sameness was gone and, at last, the wheel had come full round.

  CHAPTER 16

  End of the Invisible Hand

  The Citrus Building was one of the oldest office buildings in Los Angeles. By the Depression, it had grown decrepit and grimy. It was noisy with the burr of dentists' drills and it stunk from the cigars of cheap lawyers. The iron grill elevators moved slowly up and down. The operators gradually stopped wearing uniforms and rolled their sleeves up and smoked while they worked. The ledges of the building were whitened by the droppings of the plump stately pigeons. Rents dropped. But during the 1930's the town started moving west and tall sleek apartment buildings went up around the Citrus Building. Wilshire Boulevard became a fashionable and glittering street and the Citrus Building had an entrance on Wilshire. After the war, a group of realtors bought and redecorated it. It was painted black and gold. The pigeons remained but their droppings were carefully washed away. On the top of the building a great orange turned slowly and its green brass leaves were ten feet long. The new elevators went smoothly and quickly. It became the most fashionable business address in Los Angeles.

  On the twelfth floor, Mike Freesmith looked out a window. A single sea gull was suspended outside. It was motionless, frozen by some invisible pressure of winds. Behind it, scaled down the sky, were four other gulls. They were all motionless.

  Must be a storm at sea, Mike thought. It's the only thing that brings the gulls in. Usually there are only pigeons outside the building.

  The gull had its pink withered feet tucked up beneath its belly. It closed
a leathery lid over the single eye that Mike could see. The small feathers along the trailing edge of its wings shivered as the wind molded past the gull's body.

  "Would you like me to read back the last line?" Libby Matson said behind him.

  Mike was suddenly irritated. He rapped his knuckle on the window. The gull's eye snapped wide, it turned on its back and planed downward, away from the building. The other gulls broke their static formation and laced whitely through the sky in great swoops. Their wings, however, did not move.

  "Read it back, Libby."

  "The letter is to Ashton in Calexico. The last sentence reads, 'You should realize that the firm of Cromwell and Freesmith is not necessarily interested in having you form the businessmen of Calexico into an active group to bring the new highway through your town. Our client only desires that the wishes of the business community of Calexico be communicated to the Senate Interim Committee on Highways.'"

  "All right. Add this: 'Attached you will find a draft statement which your business community might wish to send to the Interim Committee. If your people change the statement in any substantial way, we should like to be informed before it is sent to the Interim Committee.' Put in the 'sincerely yours' and the rest, Libby."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Is Mr. Cromwell in yet?" Mike asked.

  "No, but Clara said he would be in later this morning."

  "Does he have a hangover?"

  Libby looked pained. She ran her unpainted thumbnail over the coil of wire that held the shorthand notebook together.

  "Clara didn't say," she said.

  "Well, ask her," Mike said. "Or if you don't want to ask her, send her in here and I'll ask her."

  Libby smiled with relief and left the room.

  She's a good girl, Mike thought. Loyal and bright, but too timid.

  Mike had picked her very carefully for the job as his personal secretary. Her husband was an electrician and Mike had, at once, gotten him a job with the City doing electrical inspections. It meant that her husband had to be placed ahead of a number of civil service candidates. Mike had also gotten her mother, who was blind in one eye, a small pension from the state after persuading a few people in Sacramento that the old woman had only twenty per cent vision. Mike had made it plain to Libby that both of these favors were illegal. He also made it plain to her that he did not want her to get pregnant and leave him without a secretary. Libby had agreed and she was one of the most diligent workers in the law firm of Cromwell and Freesmith.

  The door opened and Clara came in. As usual she had a cigarette in her fingers and she held it so that the smoke floated by her cheek and obscured the lividness of the birthmark. She wore a simple black dress that made her look older. But when she sat down, she turned her head and Mike could see the exquisite line of her profile; the fine nose, the deep pit of her eye, the molding of her cheek bone.

  "Is John going to be in this morning?" Mike asked.

  "Yes. Around eleven."

  "Good. I want him to go to lunch with the gang from the Board of Equalization."

  "Look, Mike, he shouldn't go. That crowd always drinks too much and it just means that Cromwell will get drunk again," Clara said. "He's already got a hangover. He shouldn't go."

  "John's a big boy now, Clara," Mike said. "He knows whether or not he should drink. Anyway, it doesn't make any difference if he does. No one can tell when he's drunk. It just makes him calmer."

  "But he hates it. You know that. God, Mike, he suffers afterward. He can't work. He feels guilty."

  "He has to go to lunch with these people, Clara. They're important. Do you know how many liquor licenses there are in this state? About forty thousand. And the people who hold those licenses do pretty much what the Board members want them to do. They control a lot of votes."

  "I don't care how many votes they control. It's not worth getting Cromwell drunk again. Being governor is not that important, Mike. Don't kid yourself. If he has to go through all this to become governor it just isn't worth it."

  She turned her face straight toward him and her large brown eyes glittered. Then she remembered and she turned her head slightly so that the birthmark was out of sight, but she was still angry.

  Does she really think other people get him drunk? Mike thought. Doesn't she realize he's a drunk on his own? No one forces him to drink. He forces himself.

  Clara puzzled him. She did everything for Cromwell, wrote his speeches, kept his appointments, made his phone calls, cured his hangovers, brushed his clothes; everything. And then, two or three times a year, she disappeared from the office. Once Mike had gone to her apartment looking for her. She had opened the door, peered at Mike and then opened the door further. She was naked and behind her on the sofa was a man with a glass in his hand. His bellboy uniform was draped over a chair; his eyes were drunken, startled and the least bit frightened. Clara was sober; sober with an eeriness that made the hair rise on Mike's neck. Go away, she said and closed the door. Before the door closed, the bellboy raised his head, focused on Mike and grinned. It was the odd strained look of an animal that is being experimented with; being studied; watched.

  Mike looked at Clara's profile as she sat across from him in the office. That beautiful, ivory-etched profile had been in bed with almost every man in the office and a lot outside the office: office boys, salesmen, messengers, Western Union boys and men she met casually at parties.

  "John wants to be governor, Clara," Mike said softly. "If he doesn't I'd better know about it."

  Clara opened her mouth to speak and then paused. She put her hand down and looked at Mike full-face and he could see the soft purple blemish.

  I'm the only person she does that with, Mike thought. As if it doesn't matter whether or not I see it.

  "All right, Mike," Clara said and she was smiling thinly. "Who's going to be at the lunch?"

  "Libby's got the list. She'll give it to you. Make sure he butters up Kelly. Kelly is the most important man on the Board."

  "I'll pick it up," Clara said. She walked to the door and turned around. "Can Cromwell get the governorship, Mike? I mean really. Not just cocktail talk, but can he really get it?"

  "He can get it," Mike said.

  "But his name isn't in the papers," she said. "And he doesn't have much power in the party, When does he start to win friends and influence people?"

  "I've told you before," Mike said patiently. "It doesn't make a bit of difference what the papers say. Not now. Later it will mean a lot."

  The doorknob turned in Clara's hand and Cromwell came into the office. He was wearing a gray gabardine suit and a new straw hat. The hat was neat and crisp and contrasted with his suit. The suit was wrinkled and twisted; it knotted around his shoulders and pulled the sleeves back so that his wrists showed. The lapel had a black charred spot as if a match had gone out on it.

  Cromwell stood in the doorway, sucking on a cigar. His eyes were bloodshot.

  "Discussing the campaign strategy again?" he asked.

  "Yes," Mike said.

  "I've thought about it, Mike," Cromwell said. "We have to get more publicity. After all, it's the people that elect you in this state. If we don't get on the radio, TV, in the newspapers, they won't know who we are."

  "We've been over it before," Mike said. "You don't need publicity now. That comes later. Right now you have to persuade the Democrats at their pre-primary convention to endorse you. Get the pre-primary endorsement and you'll be a cinch in the primary. In fact the Democrats won't have anyone else to vote for; you'll be the only Democrat on the ballot. When the general election comes up you'll need publicity. Not a lot, just a little in the right places. Christ, John, I've told you all this before. Right now if you get your head up too high, everyone will be trying to chop it off."

  "No, Mike. You have to get to the people," Cromwell said. He walked over and sat on Mike's desk. Mike could smell the faint sweet odor of gin. "If the people are for you, then the leaders have to take you." He paused and his bloodshot eyes
watered slightly. His voice became pleading. "Mike, that's what I do best; talk to the people. That's what I should be doing. Clara'll tell you that. Remember, Clara, that time in Placerville? Those lumbermen were wild for me."

  He looked out the window and his face softened with the recollection. Mike looked at Clara. She did not evade his glance and for a moment they stared directly into one another's eyes.

  "I think Mike's right, Cromwell," she said.

  Why does she always call him Cromwell? Mike thought. And why does she hate me so much? He almost grinned.

  The door opened and Libby walked in.

  "Your appointment with Mr. Blenner is in ten minutes," she said. "Here's his file. Mrs. Freesmith wants you to call her. Also there's a letter from Dr. Moore."

  She put the letter and a file on his desk.

  Clara and Cromwell left the office. Libby went out after them. Mike opened the letter from Hank. A check fell out on the desk.