by BRIAN HALL
In his last weeks, Vernon couldn’t stop saying to his RAND lunchmates, “Cheer up! We’ve got the keys to the candy store.” Even though he is an introvert—or maybe because of it—he has never shied away from arguments. Sometimes a colleague got mad at him and he got mad back. He has never shied away from anger, either. Sitting in his study looking back, seventy years old, lonely as hell, surrounded by six and a half thousand classical music records, he can’t remember what anyone else at the lunch table said. He sees that, in rejecting RAND, he became a true RANDoid: he was Wohlstetter and Paxson, obliterating his opponents with his rightness, leaving behind nothing of their idiocy but melted steel frames.
He submitted his resignation in August. For two months he’d been secretly casting about for other employment, and he’d found a job in Massachusetts. Imogen had always wanted to live in the Northeast, after her college days at Mount Holyoke. His paycheck would come from the Air Force, but he would be doing pure research on the absorption profile of ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere. Unclassy and unclassified. Over the next thirty-five years, through a series of carefully designed balloon and rocket tests, he amassed the data set that became the accepted standard in his field. There are half a dozen solar physicists worldwide who know and value his work. To anyone else who asked him, during those years, what kind of physics he did, his pleasure was to begin and end with the disclaimer, “It has no conceivable application.”
1953
Wednesdays after work at the Victor Chemical Company, instead of taking the train back into Chicago, she hops on a bus to Park Forest. She gets off near the clock tower and walks through the brand-new shopping plaza, where she stops to get a bite to eat, then continues north to the farmhouse at the edge of the open field. In good weather, as on this cloudless late April day, the walk gives her such a lift. The sun has just gone down and half the sky is orange.
She always arrives punctually at 7:50 for her 8:00–11:00 shift. Greets the funny old fart, “Sarge” Dannenfelser, who’s often in the downstairs office fussing about the incomplete schedule and the unpredictable volunteers. He was an army sergeant in World War II—his real name is Hubert—who keeps his hair in a bristly flattop and sits as though he has an ironing board up his ass. But he likes Imogen, because he’s got just enough brains to see she’s reliable. He’s somewhere in his forties, fit and trim. Occasionally as she comes downstairs from the lookout she can hear him doing push-ups in the office.
“Hi, Sarge.”
“Mrs. Fuller! I heard your steps and knew it was you. Good viewing weather.”
“The best. Still no one at eleven?”
“Not a blessed soul. Midweek is hard. But we’re doing better than the other area posts. There are a lot of ex-military folks in Park Forest with a can-do, pitch-in attitude.”
“That’s what I hear.” From you, in fact, once a week. Sweet old fool. She signs in, pins on her wings (this is hilarious, but Sarge likes them to be “in uniform” when they’re manning the post), and heads up the stairs, out onto the roof, and up the three steps into the booth. “Hi, Viv.”
“Hi, Gen.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Well, the full moon just came up.”
“Did you call it in?”
“Satellite flash! Satellite flash!”
They both laugh. Viv is wonderful. Smart and lively. She majored in astronomy at Northwestern but now has two little boys, comes out here twice a week to give her husband a little practice at helping out at home. She wishes she could take a midnight shift to enjoy the stars, but Warren won’t have it. What if one of the boys is sick, or has a nightmare, Viv says he says. He has a full-time job.
Viv pulls the string to turn on the overhead lightbulb, gathers her things. “Did you hear about the Friday graveyard shift hullabaloo?” she asks.
“No.”
“Turns out that high school boy who volunteered so eagerly was waiting until Sarge went home, then sneaking his girlfriend in.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“How funny! How’d they get caught?”
“You know Sarge. He came back last Friday about 2:00 a.m. all in a dither because he thought he’d left the office window open. He caught them in flagrante delicto.”
“Oh my god, that’s a scream. I’ll bet his hair stood up.”
“How would anyone tell?”
They laugh and laugh. Gen just loves Viv.
Viv heads down and Gen settles in. Signs in to the logbook, twitches the string to turn off the light, opens all the glass windows wide, buttons her wool coat, puts the binoculars around her neck. The little room was built on the backside of the farmhouse roof, high enough to give views in every direction. Even in cold weather one of the windows is always open so the spotters can hear as well as see. Winter coats advised. There’s a space heater, but it’s best to keep it off so the noise of the fan doesn’t interfere.
Imogen saw the article last September in the Chicago Heights Star, which she often glances at during her lunch break at Victor Chemical. Park Forest needed more volunteers for its Operation Skywatch post, because it was planning to move to twenty-four-hour duty. Imogen snorted at some of the language. Volunteers would be those “who recognize their responsibility to the defense of their home, their community, and their nation.” That kind of talk always sounded Hitlerite to her. She would have forgotten the whole thing except that there was an amusing quote from Sarge in the article, she still remembers it almost verbatim: “One weak point in Operation Skywatch could bring disaster on our nation. It seems unfair to run the risk of having to point a dead finger at yourself in the rubble of a bombed community when volunteering might have saved a life—your own!” The chirpy silliness of it just slayed her. She quoted it to Vernon that evening and it subsequently became a joke between them. If Vernon forgot to pick up milk on his way home from class or lab, Imogen would say, “Well you’ll just have to point a dead finger at yourself.” Or if an argument was getting testy, one of them would say, “Don’t you dare point that dead finger at me!” and it would help them laugh the tension away.
In February another appeal went out. The post still didn’t have round-the-clock coverage, and May to September was the time of year when atmospheric conditions were most propitious for Soviet bombers to, well, you know—do unto us. Maybe because the original article had stayed in her mind all through the winter as a pleasant joke, Imogen found herself tempted.
Just for fun. That’s what she had to say over and over to Vernon, when he thought it was a stupid caprice. You get to learn new things every day, she said. I spend all my time doing tests on phosphorus compounds. I just want a break.
But that’s not a break from work, he said, it’s a break from home.
I just want something new.
Not that she needed his permission, she made that clear. But she didn’t want her sweet big man mad at her. And he certainly was mad at first. But he came around.
She hears the growl of a plane to the north. Goes to the window with the binoculars. On clear nights like this, it’s relatively easy to find the wing and taillights. Soviet bombers would be flying dark, so this aircraft right here and now is probably not the end of Chicago as we know it, but she follows the protocol. Which is awfully crude, but what the hell. They give you a transparent plastic sheet with different-size circles on it, and you fit the plane into one of the circles. If you’ve determined the type of aircraft and thus its size (there’s a poster on the wall, useless in the dark, identifying twenty-five different silhouettes), the circle tells you how far away the plane is, or how high. The way to decide whether you’re measuring distance or height is, if the plane is less than 45 degrees above the horizon, it’s distance; if more than 45 degrees, it’s height. No kidding, that’s really what they teach you during your two hours of “training.” (Trigonometry, anyone?) In any case, in the dark it’s
more or less impossible to identify the type of aircraft from its silhouette, so the distance or height measurement is also impossible. Nonetheless, you note the plane’s direction, you pick up the phone, you say (ideally breathlessly), “Aircraft flash! Aircraft flash!” and you’re connected to the Air Defense Filter Center, where you tell them everything you know. Then you hang up, write every detail in the logbook, and go back to dreaming. During Imogen’s training they showed her a peppy little film, so she knows that at the Filter Center a lot of women are standing around a big table map and pushing little airplanes around with croupier sticks as they receive the raw data. There’s a group of self-important men sitting above them making calls to aviation authorities to check the identities of the aircraft. Unidentified aircraft are promptly blasted out of the sky. Ha! Not really, more inquiries are made, very occasionally fighter planes are sent to check them out, or so they claim, and everything always turns out to be innocent.
In other words, what a crock of shit! What a glorious boondoggle!
Of course most of the planes she calls in are approaching or departing O’Hare. High-altitude planes are commercial flights on the transcontinental flight corridor, or our own bombers or fighters, or military reconnaissance flights. Small planes are amateur pilots or business executives’ charter flights out of one of the smaller airfields in the area. Imogen wonders if the real reason for the Ground Observer Corps is that the US military would love to know how well volunteer spotters can track US bombers, in case the Soviets have ginned up a similar corps of boobies with binoculars. Or maybe the objective is merely public relations, getting as many citizens as possible fired up about the Soviet threat so they’ll support more money for the military. The one thing she knows for sure, it isn’t for what they say it’s for. But no matter. She just wanted one night a week on her own.
In between plane sightings, she gazes out at the darkness, at the ghostly streetlights of Park Forest, the yellow postage stamps of bedroom windows, the stacked blinking red lights of radio and television towers, the as-yet-nonradioactive glow of Chicago on the north horizon. She spends a lot of time looking at the stars, and after her first three weeks of wondering why she had never taken the time to learn any constellations other than the Big Dipper and Orion, she bought a star chart. Tonight’s full moon doesn’t make for good stargazing, but on other nights she’s found Hercules, Draco, Cassiopeia, Libra, Boötes, the Little Dipper. She’s seen lots of shooting stars, and gets a little thrill every time. Meteor flash!
The cool air, the quiet night sounds of wind in the trees, rustling nocturnal ground animals, flitting bats—it reminds her of camping out in the Poconos with the dear trusting adolescent girls when she taught them horseback riding during her college summers. And it reminds her, way way back, of summer nights lying in the back field with her cousins on the Alabama farm, telling jokes and having simple fun, when her mother wanted her to come in and she wanted to stay out.
There’s a percolator in the corner (Sarge has taped a sheet of paper above it: “An alert spotter is a reliable spotter”) and she fills a cup, sits again, hugs her wool coat close. Eyes and ears of the Air Force—that’s what they call the gallant G.O.C. “Look to the sky!” the posters say. She sips her coffee. Imogen is having a great Cold War.
She and Vernon never got a honeymoon. Three days after the wedding, Imogen was due to start work at Victor and Vernon had to prep for his teaching.
She remembers sitting in the last row for the lectures in graduate school. She wouldn’t have admitted it, but she felt intimidated. All those entitled men in front of her. And among them Vernon, whom she first noticed because he had the broadest shoulders. He was so broken up when his fiancée returned the ring. It touched her to see this big man, so capable and confident, who’d come from a family of nincompoops and was making something of himself, it really touched her to see him cry like a little boy. And she was realizing at the time that she didn’t much like physics. What had she been thinking? Her real love at Mount Holyoke had been horses, but what kind of future was in that unless she snagged a man with a heap of money, the way Mac did? (Mac has her own horse farm now, the lucky duck.)
To be honest, she’s having some trouble getting used to the idea that now she needs to be responsible. This is where her mother would make that tight little prim little mouth and say, I told you so. Imogen thinks sometimes with great longing of the carefree days when Mac and she used to take off for the National Horse Show in New York City. They’d stay in Madison Square Garden fifteen hours a day because they couldn’t afford to leave and then have to pay another admission fee, and they’d eat nothing but hot dogs because they didn’t have enough money to eat anything else. She tried talking about this once to Vernon, but he didn’t understand. Having extricated himself from his hopeless family, he couldn’t afford not to be sensible. She guesses she admires him for that.
Her mother gave her such a hard time when she got engaged. She knew it meant Imogen slipping out of her control. Typical for her, she dragooned Imogen’s dad into mounting the assault, and typical for him, he went along like a mouse. Vernon seems a fine fellow, etc, he wrote to her, but why not wait a year to make certain the feelings will last, you’re still young blather blather. They were always standing in her way, always second-guessing her. But she was almost twenty-two, and guess what, dear folks, she could do whatever she damned well pleased. She picked out for herself a new plaid dress to celebrate and brought her eighteen hands of blue-ribbon manhood to DC and for once she was the one who asked her father to get out his stupid camera. And in every photo she’s beaming.
She hears another plane, approaching from the west. Locates it, makes a stab at identification, calls it in, logs it. Even if this is pointless, there’s something satisfying about the orderliness. It’s like filing things away, all in the right place, who gives a shit if you never look at it again.
Her mother really started to give her a hard time in her adolescence, criticizing her attitudes, her opinions. Especially her looks. Imogen understands now that when she was fifteen, her mother, who’d always been considered the beauty of her family, was fifty-two. Something going on there.
Half an hour of nothing goes by. Imogen identifies Cygnus and Lyra. Is that Corona Borealis, near the horizon? Thinking of when she was fifteen, she remembers her first civil defense gig, riding horses through Rock Creek Park. Was it Marx who said that history repeats itself? In her case, she gets two farces. Fifteen more minutes. Still nothing. The night air smells damp and earthy and good. A whiff of cigarette smoke rising from below. Smoke ’em if you got ’em, Sarge.
Sometimes on very quiet nights she puts on the light for a minute and has fun perusing the G.O.C.’s monthly magazine, Aircraft Flash. It turns out the biggest problem in more-rural areas is that whole weeks can go by without a single airplane. Of course the observers get bored, then disheartened, and then they quit. So the Air Force occasionally assigns planes to fly over outlying posts just to give the poor observers something to observe. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
The opposite problem is all the flying saucers idiots are seeing. The Air Force has lately been trying to train G.O.C. personnel not to jump to fanciful conclusions. They’ve requested that any airborne device that cannot be positively identified as an airplane of some kind—most of the “saucers” are surely Skyhook meteorological balloons, which look like disks when they’re overhead—should simply be designated an Unidentified Flying Object, or U.F.O. Good luck with that.
Schiller said it: Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
Imogen logs in ten planes that evening. Chicago survives another shift. At eleven she signs the book, shelves the binoculars, goes downstairs. Sarge is still hanging around the office doing God knows what. Imogen doesn’t know if he has a bad home life, or no home life at all.
“Good night, Sarge. You staying?”
“Good night, Mrs. Fuller. Yes, I t
hought I’d go up myself for a couple of hours, since there’s no one else.”
“You’re like the little Dutch boy.”
“Excuse me?”
“Putting your finger in the dike.”
“Oh . . . Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”
Better than your thumb up your ass! “Well you have a good night, Sarge. It’s beautiful up there.”
She goes outside. She notices Sarge has recently tacked a Skywatch recruitment poster next to the front door, where it can be seen from the road. His hope just keeps on springing. A majority of the Ground Observer Corps are women, but of course the poster shows a man. Join Us in Skywatch! He’s pointing upward at a 45-degree angle, his straight arm looking like a— Ugh.
She walks through dark suburban streets toward the train station. They’re still building large tracts of this town, dozens of houses at a time. It’s all planned. It’s like the country never left off war production, just changed the product. She catches the 11:25 to Chicago. During the forty-five-minute ride she often reads, but tonight she writes a letter to her German pen pal, Hildegard. When Imogen was at Mount Holyoke, a woman at the Episcopal church in Westfield was organizing food and clothing shipments to Germany, where so much of the postwar population was suffering such deprivation. “Many of these people were also victims of Hitler,” this woman would say. Since Imogen was taking classes in German, she signed up to be a pen pal and also to contribute whatever goods she could afford.
