Trinity's Child

by William Prochnau

  The general's entire frame seemed to sag. “Eggheads,” he said wearily. “Remember all those four-hundred-dollar suits and alligator briefcases parading into the Pentagon from Seattle and fort Worth and Long Island? Christ, some of their slide shows would have put Coppola to shame. Bright little farts, weren't they?”

  “It was a great theory, sir. A fifteen-hundred mile cruise missile, launched offshore from a bomber, its computer memory following maps of riverbeds, mountains, bridges, television transmitters. Error probability ninety feet. Aim at home plate and you won't miss by more than first base. Terrain trackers. Somebody forgot the first whomp would change the terrain.”

  “So what do we have?”

  “With the cruise launches from the FB-111? They're going bananas. Running around in circles. Hitting mountains. Nosing into the tundra. One of 'em is heading for Stockholm. It's only four hundred miles off target. Don't guess we'll get the Peace Prize for that one.” The colonel looked at Alice. “It means the B-52's will have to go all the way in. Use the gravity bombs.”

  The general turned away and stared up the aisle of the command post. His staff had done a remarkable job, considering the damage done to both the hardware and the outside atmosphere needed for men to communicate. Of the forty-three different communications systems he normally had at his command, three or four were working intermittently. Only one seemed to be working consistently—the ultra-low-frequency system operating through a five-mile-long copper-wire antenna trailing out of the back of the airplane like a fishing line. He always figured that one would be the survivor. Unfortunately, it had its limitations. The frequency was so low and so slow, he could tap out no more than a few words a minute. On a teletype.

  Still, the early chaos had settled down to an eerie routine aboard the Looking Glass. He could sense a bizarre fascination among his people as they slowly gathered data about what had worked and what hadn't, what had survived and what hadn't. From the Looking Glass, the general thought ruefully, he had at least a blurred view into the new world he had temporarily inherited. He had already decided he didn't want his inheritance or the responsibility for the next steps. He moved forward where the colonel was scrolling—Christ, they had him thinking computer talk—through tracking maps.

  “Sam,” he said, “what the hell is going on with Harpoon?”

  “Beats me, sir,” the colonel replied. “I think he's getting ready to put down in Baton Rouge. That's where the man is supposed to be, if everything worked right on the ground. God, it's high-risk. First of all, there are mobs all over every surviving airport in the country.”

  “Troops deployed?”

  “Several battalions.”

  “But it's the other opposition that worries you?”

  “Hell, yes. Nothing visible. But we can't see beneath the Gulf of Mexico.”

  The general stared into the screen. “Pull me on the Buff, Sam,” he said.

  “Polar Bear?”

  “Yes.”

  The screen flicked through a maze of fluttering projections and then settled on a map that boxed part of Alaska, the northernmost reaches of Canada, and the edge of Victoria Island. A small white cursor stood stationary just millimeters shy of the edge of the continent and the beginning of the Beaufort Sea and then the Arctic Ocean. The cursor edged forward, as the computer adjusted to the plane's flight path, and then stopped again. The B-52 was almost on top of its PCP, the Positive Control Point at which the bomber required further orders from Alice before making the ultimate commitment to go in.

  “Do you want to call them, sir?” the colonel asked.

  “No!” the general replied in a voice so stern he startled himself. “Goddammit! No!”

  The drone of the eight straining engines went unheard by the five people inside Polar Bear One, the din of their own silence overwhelming the mechanical noise. Only Radnor broke the quiet. “Request permission to leave station, sir,” he radioed upstairs. Good God damn, Kazaklis thought. This is the second time in ten minutes Radnor, whose bladder had held through twelve-hour practice missions, had asked to come up to use the head. “Granted,” the pilot grunted. Kazaklis understood what this was. The tension of the rendezvous with Elsie had given way now to a dull, nagging anxiety that crept slowly down the spine and then bored inward to settle, like an ulcer, in the stomach. With Radnor, it seemed, the anxiety was settling a little lower. Where the hell was the Looking Glass? The waiting was worse than the action.

  Omaha Beach syndrome, the PRP psychiatrists hot-wired into the pilot's brain. Your crew is over the side now, commander. Cut away from mother, cut away from their world, their safe ship. Off in a bobbing ocean limbo between a reality understood but left behind and a new reality they can't comprehend. Don't want to comprehend. The beach, commander, the alien beach. Make it real for them, commander. Limbo is dangerous.

  Fuck off. Wire your postmortem crap into somebody else's head. Game's over.

  Aha, commander. Can't handle the end of the world? What does the end of the world mean to you, commander? A father, a mother, a girlfriend? A childhood lake where the rainbow bit, leaped, dived, and fought young hands? A fire in the rain? Those misty Oregon woods where child's eyes saw pterodactyls swoop on webbed wings and older eyes see them swooping again? Is that your lost world, your new world, perhaps? Pterodactyls swooping again? Have you lost a song? A dream? A memory? You can keep the memory, commander. But memories are dangerous now, devil children of the mind. Revenge is safer.

  Kazaklis pulled at the lumbering airplane. The Buff seemed to struggle against him, a friend no more, its wings no longer his wings. He prodded it higher, through 40,000 feet, then 45,000 feet into the rare, thin reaches of the stratosphere where each pound of fuel would yield a few more miles. But the drag of the SRAM missiles, tucked under each wing, tugged against him. The weight of Elsie's last precious gift rebelled against him. He was a behemoth now, a half-million pounds of gas and weapons and machines and flesh and blood and minds and memories and one useless body blissfully immune to the PRP threats of fathers and mothers and lovers and dreams and songs and lost lakes of a world gone. Careful, commander. The aircraft's sluggish. Who's sluggish, commander? Weighted down. Omaha Beach syndrome, commander. Fuck off. You're over the side too, commander. An old girlfriend. Thanks, mind invader. How are you, Sarah Jean? Are you at all, Sarah Jean? Kazaklis shook his head. Go away, girl-image. Gone-image. But seventeen-year-old blond curls tumbled past milky cheeks, over soft shoulders, down around firm breasts hidden, forbidden, beneath a pompon sweater. Coos Bay! Rah! Rah! Got yerself a little blond poon, has ya, bub? Shut up, Pa. Best get the poon, bub, cuz that's all yer gonna get from that one; mite too fancy, that one. Pa said you were too fancy, Sarah Jean. Halupalai was driving Kazaklis nuts.

  “Goddammit, gunner, go back and sit down!”

  The Hawaiian, bending over the telegraph machine behind the pilot's seat, jerked upright at the unexpected violence in the words.

  “You're pacing up and down like a goddamn expectant father,” Kazaklis spat.

  “Just looking for the message, sir,” Halupalai said defensively.

  “We oughta have the message by now. We only got two hundred miles to go.”

  Kazaklis let his shoulders droop. The waiting was driving them all crackers. Where was the Looking Glass? Where was the message giving them passage through their control point, confirming their targets, revealing the codes to arm weapons? Halupalai, assigned the job of decoding the instructions, had been moving back and forth between his seat and the telegraph since the refueling. Kazaklis suddenly felt guilty. He didn't like blowing at Halupalai. Nobody liked getting angry with Halupalai.

  “Hang tough, Pops,” he said soothingly. “Go on back and sit down. The doc will be out soon enough. And he'll tell you it's a boy.”

  Halupalai slouched back toward his rear seat.

  “It's a boy,” Moreau mused, “a goddamn boy.”

  Kazaklis bristled again. “Don't tell me you're gonna start the Gloria
Steinem shit. Not now.”

  “Settle down, commander,” Moreau said evenly. “Little jumpy, aren't we? History was getting the better of me. Not penis envy. After they tested the first bomb at Trinity, they sent Truman a coded telegram in Potsdam. Just like the one we're waiting for. 'It's a boy,' the message said. 'It's a girl' meant the bomb was a dud.”

  “Thanks for the history lesson,” Kazaklis said sullenly. “Maybe ours will say 'It's a person.' Then we can guess.”

  Moreau didn't reply at first. It's a girl, Harry. Sorry, Mr. President, a bomb without a cock. No blow-jobs for the Japs. No phallic club to hold over Uncle Joe Stalin. No need for strategic penetrators plunging into Mother Russia. No need for the big hard ones buried in the womb of America's prairies. Man's ultimate failure, Mr. President. It's a girl.

  “No,” she finally said. “Ours will be a boy too, Kazaklis.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ever wonder where we'd be if it had been a girl, that first one?”

  “Still fightin' the Japs door to door.”

  “Come off it.”

  “Omaha Beach syndrome.”

  “You okay?”

  “We need to do a little mission planning.”

  “We don't even have a mission.”

  “Mission planning!”

  Very shrewd, commander. Now you're being the commander, commander. Keep them busy while they're in the landing boat. Keep yourself busy.

  “Okay, heroes, we're gonna do a run-through on Irkutsk,” Kazaklis heard himself say to all crew stations.

  Downstairs, Tyler turned toward Radnor. “Jesus Christ, Kazaklis is really something. Mission planning. To Irkutsk. Jesus. Guess that's why they think he's such a hotshot. He takes everything so serious.”

  Radnor turned his head away. His stomach gnawed. Please be quiet, Tyler.

  “Not me. Tell you that, Radnor. I'll never take this stuff so serious. This is a stepping-stone for me. I'm getting out as soon as I can. Use the Air Force, that's what I say. Let 'em get you that master's degree and get back outside to a nice quiet, sane life quick. That's what I'm doing. No more war games for me. No sir-ree.”

  For the first time, Radnor thought Tyler sounded as if he were trying to convince himself. The thought made the radar operator still more nervous. He had to get away again. “Request permission to leave station, sir,” he radioed up to Kazaklis.

  Why, Sarah Jean? Nothing is forever. Why not, Sarah Jean? “Pee in your frigging boot, Radnor!” Moreau looked at Kazaklis and thought his eyes glistened. But that, of course, couldn't be, and the commander quickly lowered his visor.

  “Is the E-4 down, Sam?”

  “I think so, general.”

  “No radio confirmation?”

  “Christ no, sir. They sure as hell don't need to send up any beacons. We got one big sitting duck on the ground in Baton Rouge right now and there still are plenty of hunters around.”

  “Subs.”

  “We had no trouble taking out the ones they used in the first exchange. They were gone in minutes. We also caught a Delta-class sub in the harbor near Havana. The commander must have been sound asleep or chasing Cuban fanny in town. But we lost track of one Yankee-class boat a coupla days ago after he went silent off Haiti. And we know there were a couple more off Venezuela about the same time. We sure as hell can't find them now— or do anything about it if we could.”

  “It's a damned risky landing.”

  “I don't know if I would have taken the chance, general.”

  “We've still got a little document called the Constitution, Sam.”

  “Yeah, I know, sir. But are we even sure we got the right guy?”

  “Sam, old friend, right now you are flying around in a world without an ionosphere. You are flying over a country that doesn't have fifty functioning computers. Nobody said nuclear war was going to be an exact science. The last word we got from the Presidential Successor Locator, two minutes before it and most of the successors went, said he was the highest-ranking likely survivor. The plan said don't fart around, get the most likely. And get him fast.” Alice paused. “Bird-watching in rural Louisiana was a pretty good place to be when the bubble burst.”

  “Jesus, is that what he was doing?”

  “He was on an inspection tour of a game-management area. Camping out overnight to please the nature-lovers.”

  “You're kidding.”

  “No. I'm not. That was his job, Sam.”

  “God. A couple of hours ago his biggest problem was understanding the mating habits of the red-billed osprey. I wouldn't want to be the first guy to brief him on the forty thousand target options in SIOP.”

  “The man's got a much bigger problem than understanding SIOP, Sam. And a decision to make.”

  “Fast.”

  “Very fast.”

  “The Secretary of the Interior. Whew.”

  “Eighth-ranking in the constitutional order of succession, Sam. President of the United States. Your Commander-in-Chief.”

  “Okay, kids,” Kazaklis said jauntily. “We're at the dateline and I'm takin' her down.”

  Moreau felt the adrenaline surge through her, washing away the lingering aches of the refueling. Below her, in her mind's eye, as she had a dozen times in mission drills on the ground at Fairchild, she could see the twisted crags and soulful spires of Arctic Ocean ice floes rising up toward them. She could almost feel the huge drooping wings of her bomber, her strategic penetrator, strain against heavier and heavier air as they dropped lower and lower, beneath the radar, beneath the eyes of their adversaries.

  “Ready offense?” Kazaklis asked.

  “Ready,” Tyler responded.

  “Ready, defense?”

  “Ready,” Halupalai answered.

  “Position, nav?”

  “One hundred eighty degrees longitude, seventy-seven degrees north.”

  “Entry point?”

  “Landfall, one hundred forty-six degrees east, seventy-five degrees thirty minutes north. Asian landmass, one hundred thirty degrees east, seventy-two degrees north.”

  “Right on, nav,” Kazaklis acknowledged, his voice chipper. “Hokay, radar, we're at two hundred feet. In the weeds, pal, and whadda we got for obstacles?”

  “Landfall, no problems, sir,” Radnor replied. “Straight in over Faddeevski Island, thread the needle past Kotelny. High point on Kotelny, 1,227-foot hill starboard. Approach the landmass over Laptev Sea, with a feint straight at Tiksi. Break it off, taking a heading due south over the gulf, and tiptoe through the foothills of the Verkhoyansk Mountains back toward the Lena.”

  “Sound like you been here before, radar. Hokay, defense, the natives are a little restless down there. What you see?”

  Halupalai fumbled briefly. In front of him lay O'Toole's charts, looking like a new set of plays for the Rose Bowl.

  “Early-warning radar stacked throughout the islands,” he said, beginning slowly. “Jamming now. Missile batteries, Kotelny. Our problem. Decoys, chaff dispatched. SIOP says forty percent chance Tiksi destroyed in first wave. If not, our problem. Heavy radar concentrations, major SAM batteries. The feint will draw them out, unless they think we're a decoy for the others coming in behind us.”

  “The others,” Kazaklis said. “Yeah. That would be nice.”

  “If they see us,” Halupalai continued.

  “That's what you got all those toys for, defense.”

  “Yep. Tiksi is the biggest problem. Past the village, heading down the gulf, we got one more major battery of missiles near our entry point at Nyayba. Jamming. Decoys if necessary. Sharp eyes down below, please.”

  “That's you two in the basement,” Kazaklis said.

  “Got it,” Tyler said.

  Halupalai paused again. He could see the gray shark of the SAM racing up at him. His hand involuntarily went to the Gatling-gun trigger. He shook his head. “Then we are in the mountains,” he continued, “and the threat is MIG's.”

  “Also requiring sharp eyes down below,”
Kazaklis added. “Got your eyes open down there, radar?”

  “Wide, commander,” Radnor answered.

  “Okay, sarge,” Kazaklis said to Halupalai. “Not bad, coming off the bench. We're in the mountains now, huggin' and hidin' for a while. Three hundred feet and eyes on the ridges, please. If we got anybody watchin' up above, assumin' our guys missed a satellite or two, we're headin' on a course for . . . ?”

  “Vladivostok,” Tyler answered.

  “Or maybe the Petropavlovsk submarine base on Kamchatka,” Kazaklis acknowledged. “Shifty little buggers, aren't we? So we pivot . . . ?”

  “At one hundred twenty-six degrees east, sixty-five degrees north,” Tyler said. “Right, twenty degrees.”

  “And we're into the wide-open spaces. Tundra. Down to one hundred fifty feet. You might let me know when we see the tree line. Larch scrub first, pine forests next. No pine needles in the intakes, please. Other obstacles?”

  “Mountains about halfway,” Radnor replied. “High point, Mount Purpula. Five thousand, three hundred twenty-six feet. Eight-hundred-foot television transmitter at Vitim.”

  “Then we're in the woods again,” Kazaklis continued, “and coming up on the lake.”

  The lake. Moreau saw the frozen shore approaching, as she had in countless dreams. Holy Baikal, the Russians called it, the majestic ocean. They said it contained one-sixth of all the fresh water in the world—a saltless inland sea stretching four hundred miles long with barren nine-thousand-foot mountains jutting up from its western bank. She saw the lumbering bomber roar treetop level over the great lake's deserted northern shore, kicking up powder snow off the ice, and her pulsing adrenaline turned to clammy sweat.

  “Decision time,” Kazaklis went on. “Who makes it?”

  “SIOP,” Moreau said. “Hours ago.”

  “If SIOP, in its computerized wisdom, said the dam at Bratsk is still standing, we get a little side trip,” Kazaklis said. “We hop over the Baikal Mountains, lay a SRAM down on it, and scoot. Question of American pride. The Russkies say it's the biggest dam in the world. We get to personally put Grand Coulee, right outside good ol' Cowpatch, back on top.”