OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  Unless Sopho wanted him.

  He took hold of the ladder, sighted through the black tube to freedom's eye at the far end--and his blood turned to water.

  Three men besides the gunners? He felt horror between his shoulder blades--gun, knife, and worse. He checked crew and passengers.

  He pretended to be untangling his chute straps, preparing to go through the round-eyed hell. Jordan on the top blister. Smith left, here. White right--and the unknown man beside him. No visible rank. Coveralls--insignia worn or torn off. Bearded like a submariner or the men he had relieved on Guadal. Hawk nose, brown eyes--

  extraordinarily intelligent, too-firm mouth, a gentle, definitely civilian look. Never saw him before.

  This, the colonel realized, was obviously impossible.

  He'd trained the crew, himself--picked each man, with special help from Headquarters-and met all the passengers weeks ago--old Sopho last--but, still-weeks ago.

  Each member of the company-cleared, checked, quadruple-checked, traced by G2

  back through every childhood peccadillo, back through generations. Truman himself couldn't have got a man on board without the colonel's okay--his invitation and acquaintance.

  He felt sick and feeble; he clung to the ladder under the tunnel mouth and staggered as the B-29 dived ponderously through a downdraft. Some last-minute thing, he decided; certainly the impossible passenger did not appear to be dangerous. One could not look at him and think of sabotage at the same time. These bloody, accursed, God-damned scientists! Very Important Person--he looked every inch a VIP--a VIP in science, not military affairs. No bearing to speak of--and that kindly smile at the corners of that mouth.

  Last-minute stuff.

  It would be assumed the colonel knew--but his fourway check had slipped.

  When he returned to base-chevrons would fall. Lieutenants, captains, majors would drop back a grade.

  See who he is.

  The colonel went over to Smith, squatted.

  "Skipper!" Smith said, returning the smile, the Air Force treasure.

  The ship thrummed. Buzzed. Hummed. Ate air. Hurried toward the enemy islands.

  Colonel Calm feigned to look from the blister. He supposed he saw, in the gray below, the corrugations of the Pacific, and above, the pearly heavens, the solid stretch of wing, the streamlined engine-housing. They were there, at least.

  "The man with White. His name. Can't think of it."

  "Chris."

  "Chris what?"

  Smith seemed embarrassed. "All I know. He came through the tunnel half an hour ago. 'Call me Chris,' he said. And he said, 'Mind if I sit?' "

  The smile was a mask. He could keep it on his face even now. Eyes lighted up by the battery of will, corners crinkled, lips relaxed, a human twitch of the nose--man-loving, disdainful of blood and death, enemy and calamity. He could.

  Came through the tunnel.

  The man had not been in the control cabin, to begin with.

  No bearded man.

  No--Chris.

  The colonel turned on his bent toes, the stranger watching. Should he jump the guy? Tell Smith to dive in with him? Go back for a pistol and shoot from the tunnel? The man smiled pleasantly. Colonel Calm stood up, went round the post and track--the high barber's chair--and the gear and machinery that subtended the gunner in the top blister.

  "Hi," the colonel said.

  "Wonderful--a ship like this!"

  "I've forgotten your last name."

  "Chris."

  "Oh. I don't believe I've had the pleasure--?"

  The man held out his hand. "We've met. It was long ago, though."

  Colonel Calm had the momentary sensation of remembering. Seen him somewhere--that's a fact.

  Chris was smiling. "My being along was arranged late."

  "I see."

  "You'll want to look over my papers, perhaps? My orders, I should say."

  "Yeah. White House stuff?"

  The man shrugged. "Pretty high up, I'll admit." He began unbuttoning his coveralls. The colonel wished the man would stop looking so directly at him. Powerful eyes--like a lot of those scientific birds. They could, with a glance, give you an impotent sensation--a feeling that you weren't in command at all. A feeling that they commanded a force which could outlast you and would defeat you in the end. They made you feel--

  Christ bite them!--like a tin soldier, sometimes. And yet--high up. VIP. This was a trick mission--the trickiest of the war. You couldn't afford to make a fool of yourself. "Never mind," the colonel said. "My major probably checked you in--and forgot to mention it.

  The strain--"

  "I know your major, yes. Sad."

  "Sad? Greatest flying officer who ever took a plane off a base!"

  "Cold-blooded."

  "Right! Veins full of liquid helium. Have to be!"

  "Have to be? Perhaps. I always hesitated--though--to think of men as numbers."

  The colonel felt relieved. Major Waite's discussion of flight plans--his harangues in the briefing rooms--sometimes left the colonel a little chilled. Emptied-out. Obviously this Chris knew the major. He wasn't--fantastically--impossibly--an agent of the enemy.

  Now the colonel gestured toward the bomb bay--the radioactive uterus of the plane.

  "You--helped put it together?"

  The man seemed to grow pale. His smile disappeared.

  "No."

  "Then what--? In God's name what--?"

  "I am here," Chris said in so low a tone his voice scarcely carried through the pulsing air, "because I promised."

  "Promised? Promised who--when--?"

  "Because I said it. Lo, I shall be with you always, even unto the end of the world."

  The colonel stared--and remembered. He turned the color of ashes. His right hand, ungoverned, made upon brow, shoulders and chest the sign of the Cross. His knees bent tremblingly.

  But before he could genuflect the man called Chris touched his arm. "Don't, colonel!"

  The officer, in his distraction, was muttering a woman's name, over and over.

  Chris smiled painfully. "I am here." He glanced, then, at the watching gunners.

  The colonel looked that way, too, and recovered something of his fighting smile.

  They were--after all--his command. It wouldn't do to let them see him prostrate. The gunners responded to the direct glance--and the return of the smile--by a brightening of their eyes and a faint curving of the corners of their mouths; their attention went back to duty--the duty of scanning the void outside the domes of plexiglass.

  "My Lord--" the colonel all but whispered--"what shall we do?"

  "Return."

  The soldier's eyes faltered. "Abort the mission!"

  "I hoped I might persuade you."

  "Another would merely follow--!"

  "And them."

  "But--duty!"

  "To whom is duty?"

  A head appeared in the round mouth of the tunnel. Learned, the journalist, grinned like an imp. "Nasty crawl," he yelled. "Hope they've got that thing well insulated.

  Otherwise--I'm unsexed--or hotter than radium myself!" He saw the stranger, and halfway down on the ladder stood still. His eyes, ordinarily shrewd and compassionate, showed first a little amazement--and then twinkled. "A ringer! You would pull one like that, colonel! The American press wants to know who he is!" Learned chuckled and dropped to the metal floor. Strode the two steps forward. Gave his name. Held out his hand. Explained himself. "You're a physicist, I take it?"

  "My name is Chris." The dark eyes were luminous and kind.

  "Chris who?"

  The colonel took the journalist's arm in a hand like steel and whispered.

  Learned, also, grew pale. He stared first at the colonel and then, uneasily, he eyed the stranger. Twice, the gleam of sardonic doubt shone. And twice, with all his will and concentration, he endeavored to make some satirical reply: to say, skeptically, that this would be the greatest interview in two millenniums.

  Or to ask how
things were in the Blue Up Yonder.

  He failed. He--too--abruptly knew. The resources of his training abandoned him--

  left but the residue of naked personality. His tongue circled his lips. He gave the stranger another uncertain glance, a hopeful glance--and suddenly, on the impulse, took out his cigarettes and offered them.

  Chris shook his head. "Thanks, Learned."

  "Do you mind--"

  "Of course not."

  Now the journalist and the colonel shakily fumbled with cigarettes and the wavering flame of a match.

  Chris had turned. He was looking expectantly toward the narrow door that led to the radar room and from it, presently, Sopho came. "Thought I'd run a counter through the tunnel," he began. "Check things." He saw Chris. "Hello! Didn't realize I hadn't met the ship's full complement."

  The colonel and the reporter watched.

  "My name is Chris, doctor."

  "Can't place you. The Chicago Group, perhaps, didn't meet them all."

  "No."

  "Army, then? White House? OSS? I'm a physicist. Sopho's the name."

  "This man," said Learned, in a hoarse, uneven voice his ears had never heard before, "comes from--another place." He told the physicist.

  Dr. Sopho's right thumb and forefinger touched his small beard. Across the back of his hand--tanned to leather by his long residence in the desert--skin pimpled and the reddish hairs rose. The tiny phenomenon passed--passed like the eddy of air that dimples still water and disappears. His great head with the thin nose and the straight, exaggerate brow bent forward attentively. He was searching the stranger for obvious signs of madness. It became apparent that he found none.

  "Incredible," he murmured.

  "You do not believe me?"

  The scientist shook his head. "My dear fellow--I do not even believe in you. So--

  naturally--" He turned with abruptness to the colonel. "How did he get aboard? His papers?" He now saw the colonel's frantic, imploring eyes. "Great God, man--you don't accept--?"

  "It's the truth," Colonel Calm responded.

  Sopho looked quickly at Learned--who glanced away.

  The scientist seemed, for the first time, alarmed. Not alarmed at the statement made by the man but at its effect upon two persons whom he had considered impervious to wild suggestion. Obviously, it was up to him to break the lunatic's spell. Some fabulous stowaway--and the journalist and the soldier--drawn overfine by the magnitude of this mission--had become prey to imagination.

  One humors the mad--at any rate, to begin with. "I see," said Sopho.

  He now faced the stranger--who stood in their midst. "Tell me. Just why did you decide to accompany this particular raid?"

  Chris, still smiling, repeated his words about his promise--and after that, the promise.

  "End of the world, eh?" Sopho chuckled. "You sure?"

  "Your world--perhaps."

  "You want us to give it up? The mission?" Sopho pointed at the bomb bay.

  "That?"

  Chris looked steadily at him. "If I remember rightly, doctor, you began the preparation of--that--" he, also, pointed--"not to use against men, but to have on hand if your other enemy employed such instruments. He did not. He lies defeated."

  Sopho nodded. "Right. Now we are using it to shorten the war. Save lives."

  "Save lives?"

  "By shortening the war, man! Simple arithmetic--!"

  "What about--the next war? And the next? The wars beyond that?"

  "This weapon should--and in my opinion will--put an end to war."

  Slowly, Chris shook his head. "Strange reasoning. A weapon will put an end to war."

  "An absolute weapon, man! The world will never again risk going to war. Never again dare take the risk!"

  "It will fear too much, you think?"

  "Precisely."

  "But isn't it fear, doctor, that has always caused men to wage war? Fear in this form today--tomorrow in that form--?"

  "Can you think of a better means of ending wars--foolish wastes!--than an absolute weapon? We have changed the whole picture of war!"

  "But not changed men!"

  There ensued a moment without talk.

  Chris presently said, "This weapon. Where it falls, the genes of men will be broken. Perhaps their children--perhaps their grandchildren--will carry the heritage.

  Headless bodies. Eyeless faces. There--teeth everywhere. And yonder--no voice.

  Generation after generation, for a thousand years--this great invention will go on waging your present war, doctor, against the unborn."

  The colonel grabbed the scientist's arm. "Is that true?"

  Sopho shrugged. "In a certain per cent of cases, where radiation is extreme but not fatal--naturally, the reproductive capacity will display unpredictable, permanent damage.

  Recessive damage. When, however, two persons mate who exhibit matching gene deterioriation--then--as this man says--"

  The colonel's hand dropped. "I didn't know," he murmured. "Not certainly. I didn't even know that you men were sure."

  Learned spoke. "War against the generations! Good--!" He checked himself.

  Chris said, "Have you that right?"

  Sopho replied angrily, "That's a right implicit in any war! If you kill a soldier--

  you destroy all his potential progeny--not simply endanger a few of them. The same fact applies to civilians."

  "You do not," Chris answered, "corrupt the children of the survivors for centuries to come. No." He meditated a moment. "If the salt of the earth shall lose its savor, wherewith shall ye resavor it?"

  Sopho said, "If changing man's environment will not change the evil of war--"

  "Evil?" Chris repeated questioningly. "But does not man always believe his wars are just? Whatever cause--whichever side?"

  Sopho ignored the inquiry. "--how do we change man?"

  "Love one another," Chris said.

  A slow smile came upon the physicist's face. "We should have loved the Nazis?

  And love the Jap who lies ahead?"

  "Of course." Chris nodded soberly. "If you had loved them, you would never have let them sink into the pit of their despair--arm--turn upon yourselves. Had you loved them, you would have assisted them--before you were compelled to restrain them by such violence."

  "The rights of nations--" Sopho began.

  "--exist in the minds of men. You did not love them. You loved yourselves. You saw torment born in them all, and saw it grow, and feared it--and stood, like any Pharisee, reciting your virtues but not lifting a finger to assist them."

  "He's right." Learned shook his head ruefully. "How right he is!"

  "Love!" Sopho said the word scornfully. "Little you know of Nature. Little of love you'll see there!"

  "It's strange," Chris answered, "that I see in Nature nothing else but love. Pain--

  yes. Sorrow--yes. Tragedy--yes. To every individual. Yet--in the sum of Nature--only love."

  Sopho's eyebrows arched skeptically. "Do you really believe that the primitive phrases of a man who possibly existed--some two thousand years ago--could fix the attention of a modern scientist?"

  "Evidently they do not." Chris bent and peered through the round, bowed window of the ship as if he could orient himself even among the traceless clouds. He looked at them again. "I talked in very simple words, doctor, to very simple people. The extreme simplicity of the formulations should--I thought--make the concepts increasingly understandable, as men pursued truth. I advised them, remember, to know the truth. I meant all of truth. I warned them that an excessive fascination with worldly goods--to the exclusion of inner goodness--would undo all peace of mind--"

  Sopho chuckled. "Surely--we've pursued truth? What we carry today represents a great accumulation of truth!

  And I'll also agree that most men who merely amass worldly goods--the rich--

  aren't greatly interested in science. In truth. In anything but money. Still--"

  Chris had raised his hand. "This ship--the bomb it c
arries--all the equipment and paraphernalia of the universities which lie behind it--the projects undertaken and achieved there--what are they, too, doctor--if not worldly goods?"

  "Then you would have us put science aside? Stop seeking such truth--?"

  "Seek truth in two ways, doctor. Within--and without." He drew a breath, frowned and spoke again. "Love--in man--takes various forms. Love of self. Love of woman.

  Love of other men. Love of cosmos. Each is an altruism so designed that, through love, man shall preserve himself in dignity, procreate, and preserve all others even at the cost of his own life. Greater love hath no man than this last. Not one of these altruisms can be peacefully maintained unless the others also are given their proportionate due. The conscience of a man rises from the relatedness of these loves and is his power to interpret how valuable, relatively, each one is--not to him alone, but to all men, as each man is beholden to all. To reason only in the mind is to express the love of worldly goods, alone.

  Have you ever reasoned in your heart, doctor?"

  "Irrational emotions! Reason has no place there!"

  "But it has. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. You scientists refuse to study how your hearts think. Repent, I said. Confess, the churches say--and worldliness encompasses them! Join, they say. But I say, when you have yielded up your vanity you will contain the immortal love. My time is short, gentlemen. I thought to remind you."

  "I remember--!" the colonel's lips pronounced the inaudible words.

  Learned looked at the floor. "How do you tell them--now?"

  Sopho said disgustedly, "Metaphysics!"

  "Light was the symbol I tried to give them," Chris went on gently. "The Cross was the symbol they adopted. The pain of self-sacrifice was obvious to them. The subjective reward--incomprehensible. Thus they changed it all. I told them of many mansions. They chose this mansion or that--and scoured each other off the earth, to set one heaven in place of the heaven of those they defeated. Holy wars! Is such a thing conceivable to God as a holy war? Alas. The words--the images--the effort is still uncomprehended. I said Light. I said Truth. I said Freedom. I meant enlightenment. Yet nearly every church that uses my name is a wall against light and a rampart against enlightenment, using fear, not love, to chain the generations in terror and pain and ignorance." He pointed again. "And now--this is called civilization, and in my name, also! Enlightenment! Knowledge!" He fell silent; but at last, smiled a little. "A few knew.