Operator B

by Edward Lee

“It’s not as simple as completing the mission and out-processing.”

  “Why? You want me for the gig, I said I’d do it.”

  “There are…exigencies, sir, and—”

  Wentz felt his temper flaring again. “I don’t even know what the fuck that means. Quit babbling and give me the scoop.”

  “Once you complete the mission, there’s no returning to civilian life…no returning to your family. The implications toward national security wouldn’t permit that.”

  Wentz’s heart-rate doubled at once, and his patience left the hangar. “You little Wally Cleaver-looking motherfucker!” and then Wentz grabbed Jones by his crisp Air Force collar and slammed him against the OEV’s hull. “I had a TS/SI clearance when you were still playing with army men. You’ve got balls implying that I’d ever, EVER, break my secrecy oath, you little piece of—”

  “Release the Major!” a voice shouted. In seconds, one of the sentries had rushed forward, and had a service pistol to Wentz’s head. “Release the Major now, sir!”

  Wentz did no such thing. He tightened his grip on Jones’ collar, their faces an inch apart. “I’m sick to death of little Tekna/Byman pissants like you shitting on me. You know how many times I’ve been polygraphed and narco-analyzed, you asshole? I’ve never divulged restricted information, to anyone—”

  The sentry shouted, “Release the Major right now, or I’ll have to kill you, sir!” The sentry cocked his pistol.

  Then, propped up against a UFO with Wentz’s hands around his neck, Jones shouted back the strangest thing. “Stand down!” he yelled at the sentry. “Holster your pistol and return to your post! That’s an order!”

  The sentry, flabbergasted, lowered his weapon and backed off.

  But Wentz didn’t budge. “You think I’m gonna fly to Mars and then go home and tell my wife about it? What the fuck is wrong with you? No one’s got the right to question my loyalty to my country—”

  “No one’s questioning your loyalty or service, sir,” Ashton said. “No one’s implying that you’d breach your secrecy oaths. You’re over-reacting. Let him down.”

  Wentz cooled off one degree, and released Jones.

  Winded, pink-faced, collar ripped, Jones did a fairly bad job of regaining his composure. “Jesus, General—”

  “Then quit fucking with me,” Wentz growled.

  Ashton touched Wentz’s arm. “Come with me, sir. For the last block of your briefing.”

  ««—»»

  Another blazing white corridor, then another sterile briefing room. Wentz and Ashton sipped coffee under humming fluorescent light. Whatever this was about, Wentz knew it was serious. Minutes ticked by before Ashton finally broke the silence: “As you’ve probably ascertained, sir, there’s one more catch.”

  “I kind of figured.”

  “But you do realize the gravity of the situation, don’t you?”

  “Yes!” he snapped.

  Ashton didn’t react. “Operator compatibility with the OEV’s guidance and navigational systems requires certain…alterations.”

  Wentz looked up quizzically over his coffee. “What, system alterations?”

  “No, sir. I don’t mean alterations to the vehicle itself. I mean alterations…to the operator.”

  Wentz’s thoughts froze. The operator?

  “Surgical alterations,” Ashton finished.

  Morosely, then, she passed Wentz a glossy 8x10 photograph.

  Wentz stopped breathing for a moment.

  The photo showed two scarred, deformed human hands. Index and pinkie fingers gone, the web of the thumb gone, the middle and ring fingers widely separated.

  Human hands with only three fingers each.

  “God in heaven,” Wentz muttered, his eyes pulled open by shock.

  “That is a post-op photograph of General Farrington’s hands,” Ashton dryly stated. “It was taken three weeks after the required procedure.”

  “This is crazy,” Wentz said just as dryly.

  “The operator detents—the handprints—will not function unless the pilot’s hands are an exact, morphological fit.”

  Next she showed him another photo: Farrington’s three-fingered hands pressed into the detent outlines in the OEV’s control panel.

  “It’s absolutely essential,” Ashton went on. “There’s no other possible way to operate the OEV without first undergoing the procedure. We’ve tried every conceivable alternative. None of them worked.”

  “What alternatives?” Wentz mouthed, still looking wide-eyed at the pictures.

  “A number of Army and Navy demolition men who’d lost two fingers on each hand in training accidents. Then there was a flight technician from McCord who’d lost two fingers while working on the flap-servos of a C-141. He volunteered to have his good hand altered too but, again, it didn’t work. We’ve even brought down some civilians with tridactylism, a rare genetic defect in which the afflicted are born with only three fingers on each hand. None of it worked.”

  Wentz got up, stormed around the room. “I can’t go back to my wife and kid with hands like that!”

  “No, General, you can’t. And due to the aggressiveness of the procedure, there’s no way to effect a cosmetic reversal. The surgery requires a complete removal of the index and pinkie fingers along with their adjoining metacarpals, removal of the web of flesh between the index finger and thumb, and a 21-degree widening of the phalange-margin between the middle and ring fingers.”

  Wentz’s anger impacting with his incomprehension felt like someone hitting him in the head with a hammer.

  “There’s no other way, sir. Without the surgical modifications, the necessary conduction of the pilot’s brain waves cannot be synaptically transferred to the OEV’s systems…”

  “Well what about those other guys?” Wentz rebelled. “What happened with them?”

  “Absolutely nothing. The palmar alignments weren’t concise enough to achieve a positive connection with the detents.”

  I’m not gonna do this, he thought. I’ve got a wife and kid. But then the rest of the consideration took root. If that sample-collector comes back to earth…they’d die, I’d die, maybe everyone would die.

  “There is no other recourse, sir,” Ashton said.

  “I know.”

  “So you’re going to do it, right?”

  Wentz nodded. “Yes.”

  “Your wife and your son will be personally notified—”

  “Some cover story, I suppose. The old empty casket.”

  “Yes. They’ll be told that you were killed in a test crash.”

  It was only darkness now that filled his mind, and blazing regrets. “Joyce and I are still technically divorced. I need to make sure she gets everything, and all of my SOM pay.”

  “JAG will take care of all that, sir.”

  Wentz lowered his face into his hands, tears suddenly slipping from his eyes.

  “I’ll be back later to show you to your quarters, General,” Ashton said. Then she quietly left the room.

  ««—»»

  The next day, the banquet room of the Thornsen Center stood crowded with Air Force personnel in their Class-A’s, their wives, their children. The base commander and several other generals milled about impatiently. The entire auditorium seemed like a congregation with no purpose. Something stiff and uncomfortable throbbed through the air.

  Civilian caterers in white hats traded pinched looks behind tables stacked with refreshments and steam tables.

  Above the stage, where the retirement presentation was to be held, hung a long sign which read CONGRATULATIONS, JACK WENTZ!

  “This is so fucked up I can’t believe it,” 1st Sergeant Caudill muttered.

  “I hear ya, Top,” Sergeant Cole agreed. He glanced at his watch. “He’s more than an hour late for his own retirement. I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I—shit, there’s his wife.” Top, with considerable reluctance, approached Mrs. Joyce Wentz and her son, who seemed to be wending their way toward the exit
door.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Mrs. Wentz,” Top offered. “Maybe he got the day wrong or something. I can’t believe he’d miss this.”

  “I can. We’re leaving now, Sergeant.”

  “Well, wait, ma’am. Maybe he just got tied up, maybe he just—”

  “Goodbye, Sergeant.”

  Mrs. Wentz turned, holding her son’s hand.

  “He’s not coming, is he, Mom?”

  “No, Pete. I’m sorry. Let’s go home now.”

  Top watched them both leave the auditorium. He glanced at his watch again and grimaced, edging back to where Cole stood.

  “All this time I thought he was a great guy,” Top remarked.

  “Some great guy. Looks like he dumped his own retirement party and skated on his wife and kid.”

  “How do you like that?” Caudill said. “Wentz turned out to be an A-one prick.”

  ««—»»

  “I’m a freak now,” the words grated a day later.

  It was Wentz who’d uttered them, propped up in the hospital bed of Area S-4’s medical unit. The surgery had taken almost ten hours, and now he lay in a pain-killer fog.

  He held up his two braced and bandaged hands—hands with only three fingers each.

  “I’m a monster…”

  When the door clicked open and Ashton entered, Wentz quickly slipped his hands beneath the bed sheets.

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed about, sir. What you’ve done is heroic.”

  Wentz glanced away. “Leave me alone, will you?”

  “The healing and recovery process will only take a few weeks. After that a week of physical therapy. Then, when you’re…comfortable with, uh—”

  “With my new hands? My ruined, scarred, hideous hands?”

  “—you’ll alternately train on the OEV and participate in some EVA simulations, some simple training blocks on field demolitions. etc. Believe it or not, General, the worst part is over.”

  Wentz boomed, “Yeah? Tell that to my wife and kid! I’ll never see them again! My wife’ll hate me! My kid’ll grow up thinking I’m a lying piece of garbage who didn’t love him! Now get out!”

  Ashton sullenly left the room.

  CHAPTER 10

  For the next month, about the only sound Wentz remained cognizant of was the tick of the clock. Time.

  Time was life.

  His quarters, his office, every briefing room and every training cove—there was a general issue Air Force clock on the wall, ticking.

  The tick of the clock sounded like dripping blood.

  Every night when he slept, the commitment he’d made dug his heart out. He knew he was doing the only thing he could do, but there was no solace in that, not at night when he was alone. He dreamed of teaching Pete how to drive the new dirt bike, he dreamed of Pete’s high school graduation, sending him off to the prom, sending him off to college, and all of the other things he, Wentz, would never really see.

  He dreamed of making love to Joyce…

  All lost, all ashes.

  And then he’d waken, in darkness. He’d bring his hands to his clenched face, but the hands only had three fingers on each. And then he’d hear it.

  He’d hear the only thing in the world that never changed: the tick of the clock.

  tick tick tick

  drip drip drip

  S-4 had a psychiatrist and occupational therapist. Both Ashton and “Jones” urged him to see them—“to adjust to the necessary period of mental and physical refraction,” Jones had said—but Wentz said “Fuck that shit. I don’t need any damn shrinks. I’m a U.S. Air Force Senior Test, I’m not a nut.”

  He knew what he’d done, he knew what level his duty had taken him to (and he knew why). So Wentz did what he always had.

  He did his job.

  He spent a week on Unisys flight simulators, programmed for the OEV. It was cake. Two more days training with demolition-block material, fuses, detcord, blasting caps and primers. Eight hours a day for a week bobbing in a cylindrical water tank for zero-gravity familiarization, then several sessions in the cargo hold of a C-131 nose-diving from 40,000 feet to 5,000 feet (the latter was fun, the former…not so fun). Another cake-walk was the MMU training. An MMU (for Manned Mobility Unit) was NASA’s latest, state-of-the-art “space suit”—over $10,000,000 per suit.

  Wentz dug it.

  Days lapsed as they always had in the past, a new joyride, a new thrill. Duty, yes, but the adrenalin always made it better. At forty-five years old, Wentz scored higher on the spirometer, the MMPA, the MMU field test, and the technical diagnostic batteries than most of the country’s active astronauts.

  “Looks like you’re ready, General,” one of the training tests told him.

  “You think?” Wentz had answered. “It might look like it, but this ain’t a lug-wrench in my pants, son.”

  No, even a day after the surgery, Wentz never doubted himself. He was going to this job like he’d done every job in his career.

  The best job.

  His “shit” was “square.”

  And on the day before his first live test flight of the OEV, unfazed by the deformity of his hands, General Jack Wentz looked straight in the mirror with a leveled eye and said: “Hardcore. I’m fuckin’ there.”

  Yes, that was how the days went. He was the best pilot in the world, and they were great days.

  The only thing that bothered him were the nights. When he’d dream and later wake up to the sound of dripping blood…

  ««—»»

  Wentz sat strapped in to the operator’s seat, a modified job by Hughes Aircraft. He wore a visorless helmet and standard Air Force jumpsuit. Ashton wore the same, sitting beside him.

  They felt the modest vibration as the platform elevator lifted them up thirteen nuke-proof levels through this underground complex.

  When Ashton glanced at his bare, three-fingered hands, he moved them away.

  “Don’t be self-conscious, sir. It could debilitate you, it could degrade your performance.”

  “I’m not gonna fuck up your goddamn UFO,” he snapped back. He looked at her with a sly grin. “I’m gonna fly this thing better than Farrington ever dreamed.”

  “Fine. Don’t talk about it. Do it.”

  Bitch, he thought. I’ll show her ass.

  The elevator droned upward, then shuddered to a stop.

  “This is a daylight test flight,” she reminded. “This is strictly familiarization. Fly slow, fly stable. This first run is just for you to get the feel of the OEV. If you fly too fast in daylight, you’ll burn the camouflage paint off the hull, then we could be spotted by the KH-12 and Russian surveillance satellites.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I hear ya.”

  The elevator had lifted them up into a hangar-shaped structure, covered with sand. Just another dune.

  Then the dune began to open.

  Wentz glimpsed the beautiful desert beyond. The hangar door held open like a stretched jaw.

  “Go for it, General. Place your hands into the detents…and fly.”

  Even after all of the simulations, Wentz froze for a moment. All of his instincts were different now—

  “Raise the craft and move forward out of the hangar,” Ashton said.

  “I know!”

  No stick, no throttle.

  “Give me a sec,” he said.

  “Let your mind do the work, sir. We can go back down if you’re apprehensive, give it another shot tomorrow.”

  Bitch, he thought again.

  And then he let his mind do the work.

  Wentz lightened the pressure of his hands into the detents. He thought.

  Immediately a dark garnet-tinged light filled the interior, behind a very low sub-octave thrumming sound. Then the craft raised a foot off the elevator platform and began to move forward out of the hangar.

  “Good. You’re doing it.”

  “Charlie-Oscar, this is Jonah One,” Ashton transmitted from her CVC mike. “Request permission for take
-off.”

  “Roger, Jonah One. Permission granted.”

  Wentz eased the OEV fully out of the hangar. It’s working, he thought, dumbfounded. I don’t believe it… He moved the entire craft out into the high, sweltering sun. Beyond the OEV’s strange windows, the desert shimmered. Wentz remained in partial stasis as the craft just sat there and hovered.

  Behind them, the opening to the phony sand dune drew closed.

  Wentz gazed at the desert.

  “General, we can sit here all day if you like,” Ashton said. “You’re the boss, you know? But I kind of thought that you might want to do something other than hover.”

  “Oh. Yeah,” Wentz replied.

  Then the OEV essentially disappeared from its former stance. There was no roar of an engine being throttled to the max. There was no inertia crushing them back into their seats. There was only sky which, within minutes, faded away as Wentz took the OEV out of earth’s proper atmosphere.

  Within minutes, they were in space.