by Don Wilcox
“It’s no jumble,” said Uncle Pete. “A jumble is something without meaning. Every hexagon that turns up is supercharged with meaning. Only you have to learn to read them. It’s much more difficult than crystal gazing.”
“Well, I don’t see any meaning to this present arrangement of color.”
“Let’s have a look,” said Uncle Pete impatiently. “Let me see. Ah! Ahhh! It’s coming clear—yes. A chance bit of history. This is a scene of the ancient barbarians moving down on Europe.”
Uncle Rudy scoffed. “Barbarians! Whenever Pete can’t make it out he calls it barbarians moving down on Europe. Let me see.”
He undraped himself from the chairs and bent over the rail. “Hmmm. It’s a scene from the end of a new ice age twenty-five thousand years in the future—and—aha! yes, indeed, there they come—new hordes of barbarians moving down on Europe.”
The two old codgers fell to arguing as to whether they saw the ancestral grandfather of Attila the Hun or one of the illegitimate descendants of Hitler the Beast. Bill, for once, sat back and made no big talk.
Uncomfortable was the word for any of Bill’s silences, for they gave him time to face the fact that most of his habitual bluster was a screen to hide his own uncertainties. He lived in a private world of uncertainties that hinged on luck, good or bad. He was always on the lookout for symptoms of changing luck. It was his habit to carry a pocket full of charms when he made his flights over Germany. Any little disturbance could puff up into a superstition. Once he had actually begged off because of a premonition that he would be a jinx that day, for the bombing crew.
And yet, for all his superstitions, Bill was no coward.
“Enough of this arguing,” Uncle Pete said, “We must entertain our guest. Helene asked us to be nice to him so she could stay out longer with his friend.”
“Telling his fortune might be nice,” said Uncle Rudy. “Again, it might not. We never know what to expect.”
They both turned to him and asked him to concentrate on his own future. For five minutes he concentrated while they allowed the drums to spin. The light of whirling gems flashed in criss-crossing paths of spangles all around the ivory room. Then the drum came to a stop.
“There it is,” said Uncle Rudy. Uncle Pete’s fluffy white hair fell across his cheeks as he bent over the cylinder. When he looked up his comical face was strangely grave.
Uncle Rudy looked too, and he started walking away slowly without looking at Bill. “We’d better not tell you.”
The laughter had gone out of his voice.
“What’s up?” Bill said reproachfully. “I can take it.”
He walked across and peered into the cylinder. The jeweled pattern was much bolder and darker than before, a hexagon heavy with dark reds and bordered with a stony gray,
“Come on, what’s the dope?” Bill insisted.
“You’d better wear a shield over your heart,” said Uncle Pete. “About the time of the invasion there might be a bullet with your name on it. Maybe several.”
Bill spoke loud and nervously. “Hell, that don’t surprise me. Why should I be surprised, just as long as I get to do my part in the invasion. That’s what I’m living for, isn’t it?”
“You’ll have plenty of steel in your tissue about that time.”
“You’re talking in puzzles,” said Bill. “Do you mean steel nerves? Of course—”
“You’ll have a special mission for General Eisenhower. An errand to the French Underground. Don’t fail him.”
Bill’s eyebrows raised skeptically.
“I don’t quite fathom that.”
“Always remember,” said Uncle Rudy, “that we’re good at mending broken hearts.”
“Double talk again,” Bill muttered. “If you think I’m in love with your niece—well, I’m not. Not much.”
“Don’t be,” said Uncle Pete, shaking his white locks. “A man who isn’t coming back shouldn’t fall in love.”
“Hmmp, Pretty sure of yourselves, aren’t you,” Bill muttered with a show of temper.
But the two uncles paid no attention to his mood, now. They were pacing the floor, handing out puzzling comments right and left. Uncle Rudy came to him with medicine bottle.
“Better drink from this every day.”
“What is the stuff?”
“Liquid stone and steel. It’s the juice of a cathedral mixed with the nectar of an iron statue. Drink a little every day.”
Bill took a sip of the cherry-red liquor. It tasted like fire. They put the bottle in his hip pocket when they led him to the door.
“Liquid stone and steel,” Bill echoed as he walked down the street. “Now what did they mean by that?”
At the first corner he was accosted by a messenger from the Supreme Allied Command, who said, “Are you Lieutenant Bradford? . . . I’ve been looking for you. You’re to report to Eisenhower headquarters tomorrow for a special D-Day assignment.”
CHAPTER III
Under Water to the Underground
The wind roared past the open side of the plane. D-Day was on, full blast, and March, Big-Noise Bill, and Wagner, riding over the thick of it, had already seen action aplenty. Now Wagner hurled the straw dummies with the one-two-three rhythm of a machine. They parachuted down slowly.
The first of them struck, at last, hundreds of feet below. It gave off a burst of fire.
The second landed and exploded. A third and a fourth blast of flame could be seen, following in rapid succession. Bill Bradford’s heavy eyelids widened to see the effect. On a hillside far to the northeast a detachment of Nazi soldiers broke out of position and came racing down the long slope, on foot and in cars, to surround these noisy skyborne troops of straw.
Meanwhile, Lou Wagner kept up the machine-like efficiency. Bill tried to help him, toward the last. It was a mistake. A dizziness caught Bill and he sank to his knees.
Lou turned to offer a hand.
“Hell, don’t stop for me,” Bill growled. He shook a fist at the door, a gesture for the enemy. Lou took the hint and went on heaving dummies.
The awful feeling in Bill’s chest was growing tighter, but it was not the same feeling he had had when he thought, yesterday, that he was dying. That had been a weakening, fading, far-awayness, like the slow oozing of air out of a balloon. This was different—a heaviness—an exaggerated sensitivity to every thread of pain.
He put a bottle to his lips. He drained the last of its fiery red liquor and tossed it out the open side of the plane. He lay down on his side, resting his parachute pack against the floor, and closed his eyes.
Then he felt the plane banking and he roused up.
“On east, March. You know the original plan.”
Captain Marchand scowled back at him. “We’re not going to let a sick man parachute down.”
“Sick or dead, I’m going on according to plan.” Bill fished in his pocket for his order from the supreme command. “This is still valid.”
Marchand shrugged and accepted the suggestion. He swung the plane on to the east. He grumbled, “We’ll respect that order, but Lou or I will do the dirty work, not you.”
“There’ll be no argument about that, either.” Bill held a pistol. “I’ve got orders to deliver my goods in person . . .”
He parachuted down where a peasant was plowing a long furrow, apparently oblivious to the invasion furor all around him. The furrow pointed south across the field toward a brown thicket with a barely perceptible outcropping of brown rocks. This was right. The peasant went on plowing, and that was right, too. Bill climbed out of his harness and stumbled along on heavy feet. The thicket swallowed him up . . .
High overhead, Lou Wagner stared down as long as he could see that field.
“Great guy, Bill,” Lou said. “Kinda noisy, but he’s got plenty of guts.”
“Great guy,” March echoed. “Superstitious as a fox, but I’m damned if his superstition didn’t get him back on his feet. Or something did. What the devil was that thing pumping
him back to life?”
“I’ll ask Helene about it. Whatever it was, it was turning him gray. Did you notice his chest?”
“What about it?”
“It looked like a chunk of concrete . . .”
Three or four times, through the long dark tunnel, Bill stopped to tap a small stone against his chest. Then he tapped it against the stone wall to compare the sounds. The heaviness that gathered was more than tired muscles and constitutional fatigue.
But the heaviness, so much like stone, was by no means a numbness. It was full of intricate feelings, as if the tissues of his heart and lungs and pectoral muscles were turning into a filigree of steel nerves and leaden cells.
When he stopped for a moment of rest, he could hear the slow, rhythmic ticking of the big artificial heart locked upon his chest.
The dark tunnel opened on a river; above him was the viaduct that he had expected. The bright afternoon light stung his eyes. Far away the thunder of big guns sounded. Between the waves of explosions he could hear the sharp click of Nazi boots on the steel viaduct overhead.
He meant to cross that river by the passage known to the Underground. Five hundred paces downstream there would be a junk heap—but five hundred paces were no longer an accurate measure to Bill Bradford. His feet were gathering weight. His steps were short.
He held to the shadows of the sloping bank. Once he looked back to the viaduct. The German guards hadn’t seen him. Their eyes were on the lookout for plane attacks.
Five hundred paces downstream Bill crept toward a heap of broken stones and rotten wood “that had once been a fisherman’s dwelling. Something moved amid the ruins. Bill began to sing, in his dusty throat, some old folk song. The movement became a beckoning arm. Bill moved into the passageway on hands and knees. He must hurry. A squadron of allied planes was approaching, taking in numerous targets along the river.
The Frenchman who guarded the conduit through the river could not speak English, but he appeared immensely satisfied with Bill’s papers. He showed a glow of appreciation at the gift of a chocolate bar. But when Bill offered him a good luck charm, he couldn’t understand, and refused.
Bill crawled down into the curved, corrugated metal pipe that ran under the water. It was a strange way to cross a river. The long metal tube was too narrow for his long body to proceed on hands and knees. He crawled with difficulty. Solid blackness. Metallic echoes flowing from one end of the conduit to the other. The echoes of his own stony hands slipping over the corrugations. Echoes—and suddenly an ear-splitting bolt of thunder!
Blammmm! Balooombahhrr! Thrummb-thrummb-crasssh!
The explosion seemed only a matter of yards away. The corrugated metal passage bounced with the impact. It ripped, at some point back of Bill. The black waters poured in like a flood. He was caught.
He was caught halfway across the river, many feet under its surface, and now his metal tunnel had snapped like macaroni under the impact of a bombing explosion. That’s what had happened. He knew it instantly. Allied bombs were dropping over the viaduct a few rods upstream.
Two more bombs! And from the uproar that beat against the conduit, the whole viaduct might have been rolling down upon him. The end of a mission, he thought. Water struck him from both ends of his metal trap. Caught like a rat. If only he could have delivered before this happened!
He held his breath. He clawed at the corrugated metal. The slime and black water went through his clothing, swept over his arms, filled in around his ticking metal heart. He reared his head high against the top of the pipe. The water filled his ears, splashed onto his cheeks, swept into his nostrils.
He was completely compressed, with no chance to breathe. Breathing was a thing of the past. These were last seconds to be filled with that last dizzying whirl of thoughts—
Yes, the allied bombers had done well by that viaduct. And all the ugly enemy on it, and countless hundreds or thousands more who might have used it as an escape to Cherbourg would be a part of this triumph. Bill’s life was a small price to pay, he realized. If only he could have delivered!
A last choking moment of life, it seemed. The thumping of debris against the pipe struck with new thunder. Bill had a premonition that life might be crushed out of him by stone and steel from the bombed viaduct before this long moment of drowning snuffed him out.
Then, suddenly, he was being lifted.
A ripping of metal and a slushing of the black flood around him accompanied his lift. The section of pipe that held him was being hurled upward . . . Air!
He breathed with a gratefulness that was like a prayer. Above him was a circle of blue sky. For the moment the torn conduit had been upended by the jostle of debris that had pounded it and bounced it out of position.
Bill clung for dear life. Then he climbed. Within a few seconds he reached the top of the jagged metal opening. He looked out. The pipe that held him stuck up like an immense mud-washed smokestack, hanging at a steep angle above the boiling river. Upstream—no viaduct! Only ruins, twisted and matted and thrown in all directions.
A few of the Germans had escaped with their lives, and Bill could hear them shouting back and forth as they tried to recover their own wounded.
Bill dropped off the jagged end of the pipe. He fell only a few feet to the water. The shore he wanted was hardly twenty yards away—a hard enough fight for his painful, throbbing body, but he knew he could make it.
He dragged himself up the bank like a mud-soaked turtle in a shell of lead.
Freedom from death! He breathed the sweet thought. Another chance to do—
The enemy boots pounded over the bank. The enemy pistols blazed fire. The first bullet sank deep into Bill’s head. He fell forward. And as he fell, his body gathered other bullets.
CHAPTER IV
Living Dust
Had any man ever endured such sensations before?
Bill’s eyes were closed. One side of his brain was numbed. The torn flesh of his body cried out for mercy. And yet he was poignantly aware that those bullets had not brought on the normal death.
The feelings of changing to a stony, steely material came over him anew. Through parts of his body the sensations were so vivid it was as if he could see the thousands of separate strands of human tissue—soft little silky threads being transformed into a network of taut piano wires; bundles of muscle cells filling out into hard slices of stone. There was no bleeding from his wounds. Any blood his tortured body might contain was a different blood that worked like living concrete.
Another strange awareness came to him, as he lay on the river bank beneath the darkening sky. The dust and smoke of fighting that drifted slowly through the air acted with something like a magnetic attraction for him. It oozed along in misty streams and gathered over his damp paratrooper boots.
He rose slowly to his feet. The two miles between him and his destination seemed a long distance to such heavy stone feet.
Through the darkness he walked.
He shamed himself for being so slow. He was distressed that his attention should be so fully absorbed by the strange labyrinth of tortured, ossifying nerves. In these, the most dramatic hours of all history, for all people—and these wonderful, terrible sensations from his own body continued to dominate his thoughts. How long could they go on without carrying him over the final brink of death?
Late in the night he reached the appointed spot. The two miles of moving as living stone must move—it could hardly be called walking—had been fought through to success. His left arm bumped against the cellar door—stone against rotting wood. He stood there motionless, the pistol in his right hand.
Three members of the underground questioned him by turns, and when they were convinced that he was the man they expected, one of them ran through the night to overtake the one comrade who should receive the message. For the key man in this set up had started on his way a few minutes earlier, convinced that the message from England would not come through.
Bill’s voice was strange to h
imself. His jaws were almost paralyzed. He forced the words like separate slabs of marble being laid out, one weight at a time.
“If . . . you . . . are . . . the . . . one . . . you . . . know . . . where . . . the . . . message . . . is.”
The Frenchman did know. He reached to Bill’s pistol, he unscrewed a plate from the handle, removed the papers. By candlelight he scanned the contents eagerly and pocketed them. He called a few hasty orders to the other members of this underground group. Then, with a touch of courtesy, he replaced the plate on the pistol handle and returned the weapon to Bill’s hand.
With hardening fingers Bill tightened his grasp on the pistol. Yet there was still enough flexibility from wrists to fingertips that he gave a slight gesture of farewell as the underground party hurried away.
Back of him the candle still burned as he fought his way slowly up the stone steps.
He saw now, for the first time, what ungainly things his shoe soles had become. Wide oval slabs of mud and stone and dust had grown fast to his feet. As if his boots were mounted on pedestals. The boots, too, were gray and stony. His very clothing was turning to stone. Somehow this did not surprise him, now. For in these weird hours of metamorphosis he had felt a reaching out of his new nerves to everything they could touch, bringing everything in as a part of him.
His artificial heart was still ticking. It no longer protruded, something apart from him. It had moved inward to become an integral part of him. He was a creature of that heart.
It was still ticking when he came to a dead stop in the center of a deserted village.
Pink dawn rose above the war clouds. Great battles would come again today. And he would stand here, unable to move any farther.
Standing motionless, he gave way to a sort of sleep. His pain was beginning to fade. This sensation of stupor was most welcome.
He awoke abruptly. German troops were hurrying through this village. Allied bombers were swinging over. Buildings were crashing around him. Some big guns must have picked this target.
