The officers, embarrassed by his weeping, looked away. Only the famous general watched him. He’s letting me cry, Dick Gibson thought. He’s letting me get it all out. Poor Dick Gibson, he blubbered silently.
The general waited a few moments, then stepped forward. There was a war on. “Feeling better?” he asked gently.
“Yes sir,” Dick said, his nose filling.
“Calmed down?”
“Sir, I am,” he managed forcefully.
“Talk business?”
“Business as usual,” Dick said, and took out a handkerchief and emptied his sinuses.
“That’s the spirit,” the general said when Dick, his nose clear once more and his eyes dry again, looked at him brightly.
“What’s up, sir?” Dick asked.
“We’ve been playing the transcription,” the general said. “Remarkable. You were hysterical. Fear brings things out in you.” Dick blushed. “No, you don’t understand. We want you to do the same for us.”
“We want to hear the war,” one of the other officers said.
“Yes,” the general said, “this place—” He indicated their surroundings with his arm. For all the fullness of his emotion, Dick understood exactly what the general’s gesture meant. It took in the false floors and new walls, the elevator and desks and typewriters and secret pockets of the secret service. But more than anything else Dick understood his gesture as an indictment of the chairs.
For all the precision of his understanding of the moods in the room, it was a long time before he could concentrate on what they were actually trying to tell him, however. Only a certain sharpness and impatience in the general’s tone impelled him to put it all together.
He was to be sent to the most terrible war zones of all, and from these incendiary landscapes he was to send back reports, transmitting them the thousands of miles to headquarters over special equipment. They were interested not in military information as such, but in the feel of the campaigns. He was, in short, to do the color on World War II. Lieutenant Collins was to be sent along with him as his engineer. Except for the incident during the air raid, they worked well together.
Dick asked if the enemy wouldn’t be able to pick up his broadcasts.
“Negative,” a naval commander from research and development said. “We’ve perfected this transmitter and receiver that work on a band below three kilocycles. Your standard broadcast band begins at 550.”
He was given to understand that the assignment would be dangerous. He expected to be told this. They would understand if he turned it down and chose instead to be court-martialed. He expected to be told this. His infraction wasn’t actually treasonous. The Judge Advocate representative told him that his punishment wouldn’t amount to more than an eleven-year sentence and a reduction in rank. He expected this. They wouldn’t force him. This wasn’t unexpected. No man would look askance if he didn’t “volunteer,” and of course there was some good-natured laughter at the use of the word “volunteer.” Did he understand, then, what was required and that they weren’t trying to push him into a corner? He expected to be asked.
“Affirmative.”
Did they understand, then, that knowing the risks he was still willing to go through with it?
He anticipated that one too. “Affirmative, sir.”
Indeed, after the general’s speech, he expected everything, all of it. He understood that the exceptional life—the one he had been vouchsafed to live—was magnificent yes, but familiar too, unconventional but riddled with conventions of a different, higher order. The full force of it descended on him; he could almost plot it. There would be— success. And lurking in the success, danger, suffering different from that he’d already endured, which was merely niggling loneliness and his apprentice’s uncertainty. Now the loneliness—God, the women he’d have—would exist inside power. Poor Dick Gibson, he thought; poor little rich boy. Now there would be tantrum and flaw, which he would try to guard against, learning to take advice from trusted advisers. And at the apogee there would probably be betrayal and slowish death. (Unless his end came suddenly, stylishly, à la mode—in a private plane he flew himself, perhaps.) But for now he was safe, snug as a bug in their lousy war zones (though he was a little nervous for Lieutenant Collins).
So, he thought, pledging himself, I am ready for things to happen to me. Let the clichés come. I open myself to the great platitudes.
The generals indicated he could leave. They would be in touch with him soon.
He paused at the door and looked at the famous general.
“What is it, son?”
“You saved me too,” he told him. “I don’t mean the court-martial. I thought I belonged with the brutes. But I feel pride. A brute doesn’t feel pride.” He saluted, and the general returned it, and Dick left.
“Ah,” said the famous general when Dick had closed the door behind him, “but he’s the only one who does.”
4
FROM THE ARCHIVES: TRANSCRIPTS OF DICK GIBSON’S BROADCASTS OF Fabulous Battles of World War II: Mauritius.
“Dick Gibson talking low on the low band.
“We’re on Mauritius. Formerly Ile de France. Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. Breasting the twentieth parallel like a runner breaking the tape. Sister isles, all volcanic—Réunion (a French possession), Rodrigues and the St. Brandon group. Who’s St. Brandon, patron of what? Sounds English to me. How did he get those spic brothers Réunion and Rodrigues for sister isles? What miscegenous, nigger-in- the-woodpile history went on here, anyway? Who, wanting something for nothing, looking for what trade routes, asking the way east from the way west like those other old junkmen of science, the alchemists, found this place? Who charted it on maps, informing the old cartographers so they could erase their ancient lame finesse, Hic sunt leones? It is the world, real as Paris.
“The light is terrible, and I have no smoked glasses, though Collins, an officer, does. There’s not much here. Lieutenant Collins agrees. Wait, I have my map. Hmn. Well. Hmn. Oh. Mnh hmn. Say, let’s try that. Here’s how I read it. I see from the Miller Cylindrical Projection that we are the last island cluster of democracy in the Tropic of Cancer, a short hop from the Tropic of Capricorn border. We are the Gateway to the Antarctic, a key cog in the bitter battle to control the glaciers. Am I getting warm?
“When I was a boy I imagined war as a cataclysm, an extended chaos. I puzzled where soldiers slept, when they ate. After a while I came to believe that wars had no silences save those of ambush. War seemed to be some eternal fire, sourceless and undying like a nasty miracle. Just a hint of the undisrupted was more exotic than the fiercest massacre. What, the mail goes through? The lottery isn’t stopped? The restaurants are full? Imagine. Now I perceive something of the thinness of cataclysm and know that more bombs fall in the sea than on the city, but a piece of my terror hangs on. In neutral Lisbon, where uniformed Germans and uniformed Americans walk side by side and buy papers at the same newsstands and ask the same questions of the hotel porter, and wait behind each other at the gas pumps, and no one draws his gun and there is less skulduggery than in Cleveland, my flesh crawled and I had bad dreams. Collins flew in first class and I in economy on our commercial flight here, and sitting beside me was a Japanese soldier who helped me recline my seat because the button was stuck. Neutrality is the miracle. I do not understand how forces can swirl and swarm and elude each other.
“Unless Collins has secret orders—he swears he hasn’t: our proximity has made us neutral; already he swears to me—I don’t understand what’s happening here, or why we came. There’s nothing to report. There’s a garrison of British soldiers, here since before the war. These men, never rotated or reinforced, seem residents of the place, as much its citizens as the Chinese, Dutch, Indians, French and Africans who live here. Occasionally there are reports that the Japanese have put troops ashore on one of the nearby islands, and then there is a flurry of military activity as the men go out on patrol. There’s some evidence that there are Japan
ese around, a few but at no greater than patrol strength, and as they make no move to threaten the garrison at Port Lewis, the island’s principal city, the British don’t try to engage them.
“It’s pretty much a planter culture here—no industry and a rattan feel to life. I guess at its essences. Mauritius would use its barks and leaves and boles. Commerce blooms from its rangy stalks and thorny brush. There are goods in its grasses. I smell high-grade hemps and queer cocoas. I sniff deck tars, caulking syrups and narcotics in the island’s fibers—hashish and bhang and cannabin. And there is something brackish and briny in the tangled mat of the growth, as though the vegetation were merely the dried top of the sea.
“As per our orders, Collins and I protect the equipment. One of us is at the transmitter at all times. Off duty I either drink with the British or roam about the place, sometimes climbing the grassy slopes of the volcanoes that acne the landscape. I’ve exhausted Port Lewis, seen its single museum—a curious place which in addition to its limited collection of paintings, mostly by the planters themselves, holds the largest collection in the world of the skeletons and reconstructed bodies of the extinct dodo bird which, for some curious reason, once thrived on Mauritius and Réunion isles.
“Is this the sort of thing you want?”
“A tip of the Dick Gibson cap to the High Command. You knew what you were doing, all right. Increased activities among the Japanese. A few small landing parties spotted by some of the planters. They disappear quickly into the jungle. No real alarm at the British garrison yet, as there is no evidence that they are bringing any heavy equipment with them.”
“Still more landings reported. They seem to be concentrated on Réunion, though one or two have been seen on the beaches of Mauritius itself. Yesterday a cache of armament, though of a strange sort. Primitive. Perhaps for jungle warfare. The British colonel here says the stuff looks almost like traps. One interesting sidelight: some of the Japanese accompanying the soldiers are dressed in civilian clothes.”
“A Japanese task force has been spotted steaming toward Mauritius, about two days off. Vichy France has sent troops to Réunion. The garrison here has been placed on alert. All Asians are under strict scrutiny. The buildup on both sides is terrific now.”
“By now there seem to be as many Japanese as British about, though both forces have thus far managed to stay out of each other’s way.”
“The Royal Air Force is here.”
“It’s a collision course, all right, though no major engagements yet. One of the Japanese civilians attached to the Jap army was captured and interrogated. He turns out to be a scientist—an ornithologist.”
“The report has come back. It’s official. HIC SUNT DODOS!”
“The dodo is an extinct species of ungainly, flightless bird of the genus Raphus or Didus. Its incubation ground and later its world was the island of Mauritius. It was closely related in habit and aspect to a smaller bird, the solitaire, also extinct but once indigenous to the island of Réunion. It has long been held by ornithologists that the dodo—both the dodo proper and the solitaire henceforward will be subsumed under the pseudo-generic term ‘dodo’—was related to the pigeon, but this is only an hypothesis since the bird has not been available for study since 1680, the year that the last known dodo died. Although the dodo was sent to European museums, no complete specimen exists, and today only the foot and leg of one specimen are preserved at Oxford. The representations one sees, even in the Mauritius Museum of Art itself, are merely restorations, little more than cunning dolls constructed on skeletal frames. Nevertheless, the skeletons, the scattered bones of which are to be found abundantly even today in the Mauritian fens and swamps, have been painstakingly reassembled by Mauritian dodo artisans—the best in the world—and give an accurate picture of what the bird was like.
“He was large, slightly bigger than the American turkey whom he in no mean way resembles. In silhouette the dodo is not unlike a great scrunched question mark. For detail we may refer to the paintings from life that have been made of the bird, many of the best of which are still here in the Mauritius Museum of Art and Dodo Reconstruction. Most of the artists seem to be in agreement that the animal possessed an enormous blackish bill which, together with the huge horny hook in which it terminates, constituted the shepherd’s crook of the question mark. Its cheeks, partially bare, seem oddly weather- beaten and muscular, like the toothless cheeks of old men who have worked out in the open all their lives. Black except for some whitish plumage on his breast and tail and some yellowish white the tint of old piano keys on his tail, the dodo was somewhat formal in appearance, if a trifle stupid looking. This formal aspect is attributable also to his wing, foreshortened as a birth defect, which in repose flops out and down from his body like an unstarched pocket handkerchief.
“Dodos are said to have inhabited the Mauritian forests—this is the style of information, of certain kinds of fact; I find it relaxing—and to have laid a single large white egg which they mounted high in a setting of piled grass. Hogs, brought in by the settlers, fed on the dodo eggs and on the dodo young, and in one or two generations the birds were extinct.
“By now you have the reports, the action paced off in the war room, set pin for pin like surveyor’s stakes in alignment, the lines drawn in a terrible cat’s cradle of possibility. This, what I do, is something else.
“The buildup was flawless. Men came from the sea, from the air. They peeled off the landing craft and ran up the beach like barbarians. Paratroopers bloomed in the sky like flowers and grew into the ground. The trade routes are really open. I celebrate the Department of Deployment, reinforcements, fresh troops. (There’s something virginal in the sound: showered, shaved, their fight untapped, blossoming in their pink skins. ‘Fresh troops’: it sounds pasteurized.) And cooks to feed them and clerks to count them. And the Japs the same, as good as you in producing populations out of thin air.
“But you know. And who am I, Dick Gibson, to be telling you all this? You know what I think, High Commanders, Chiefs of Staff? This broadcast of mine is a little like prayer. Well, not prayer exactly, but still, there’s a soupçon of reverence and a touch of review. That’s what you want to hear, right? Am I getting warm? That’s why the low band was invented, High Commanders on High.
“I’ll tell you what happened. History is good experience for me, the itinerant radio man.
“Collins is the officer and must command me to rise. Yesterday he came to my room to wake me but I was already up. I’d awakened before dawn. I’d heard some noises and couldn’t fall back to sleep. At first I thought the engagement had begun, but when I went to the window there were just some trucks and black shapes moving in the street. I assumed they were more reinforcements for the garrison. Then it occurred to me that they might be Japanese, but when I called down a British voice yelled up at me, so I went back to bed.
“Then something that has always been undeveloped in me—I mean my sense of place—suddenly surged up and overwhelmed me. Why, here I am, I thought, on Mauritius, one of three or four places on the globe which merely to have seen qualifies a man as a traveler, I mean a wanderer, one of those whose fate it is to be troubled by laundry, mail months old, irregular bowel movements, a certain ignorance about time and a taste gone crotchety through nostalgia for things eaten long before. How did I get this way? I wondered. It can be no accident when one finds himself sizing smooth pebbles on the cold coasts of Tierra del Fuego. To see a desert is to scorn a city, and to lick a finger that has once been in the Weddell Sea is to eschew the ordinary salts forever. What had earned me distance? In America I had crisscrossed the country, leaping in and out of landscape, stitching my wild, erratic journey. The mile is a measure of madness too, and a map is hot pursuit. (This is still the war news.) Gradually the room grew light and I could perceive the objects in it—the four-bladed fan that hung from the ceiling like a great spider, the cane furniture like petrified vegetable, the huge wardrobe, big as a piano crate, the white mystery of the
mosquito netting. They were the solid evidences of my own strangeness. Why am I far afield?
“I rang for my tea and porkchop—think of that, a porkchop for breakfast—and the little half-naked native brought it up on a tray. Still standing beside my bed he kneaded the warm half-baked dough they use here as rolls and pinched the last counter-clockwise swirls into it. How does he live? He is fourteen and already married and a father. My 15 percent service charge which must be divided with the chambermaids and hall porters and laundry people and maintenance men cannot keep them all. This hotel has been practically empty since the war began. What strange arrangement goes on here?
“As I was finishing my breakfast Collins came for me and we drove straight to the garrison. It was deserted. The troops I’d seen were not reinforcements. They’d been pulling out.
“‘Where could they have gone?’ Collins said.
“I stood with all my weight on one hip, the deferential stance of one waiting for someone else to make a decision for him.
“‘Something may be up,’ Collins said. ‘We ought to find out where they’ve gone. There’s probably someone around.’
“We found a man in the infirmary who told us the garrison had gone off to make contact with the Japanese at the southeastern edge of the island, about a half-day’s trip over rough terrain.
“‘Looks like the real thing,’ Collins said. He did not seem very happy. ‘What the hell is this about anyway, Dick? How’d a couple of old radio men like us get involved in all this?’
“In a way he was thinking the same thoughts I had earlier, but I only shrugged.
The Dick Gibson Show Page 14
