The Ninth Wave (25 page)

Sometimes the barrier was made up of subtle unseen things. Things like
the ghostly ping of the sonar gear as it echoed through the water,
probing for the enemy. Or like the strange stabbings of the radar gear
which reproduced on a black scope the luminous worms which were enemy
ships and airplanes. Or the IFF gear which mechanically and endlessly
sent out a signal, "identify friend or foe." Or the "Fox schedule" which
filled the air of the world with a ceaseless pattern of dots and dashes
and which, like a bodyless intelligence, directed the movements of the
long anonymous lines of men.
Only at a few times and in a few spots did the lines of khaki become
separated from their protective barrier. When it did, the edge of
the khaki wave suddenly exploded in bloody sticky froth. Then Marines
screamed insanely on reefs a quarter mile at sea and their broken bodies
sank reluctantly into the water. Then soldiers watched objects like
rocks soar out of the jungle at them and lie sputtering at their feet
for a moment until the objects exploded and sent hot grenade fragments
shredding through kidneys, muscle and eyeballs. Then enemy task forces
maneuvered through the blackest night, probing one another with radar,
and, finally cutting the night with slow-traveling projectiles which
smashed steel ships into indecent hulks. Then men in a B-24 watched a
Messerschmitt knife sharply through the sky, roll slowly on its side and
then suddenly the leading edge of the Messerschmitt wing would crackle
with fire and the machine gun slugs would tear the bomber to pieces,
and with a giant whoosh of gasoline burning it would be gone -- with
nothing left but falling shreds.
Most of the time the great mobile protective barrier of equipment
and organization was there, but when it wore thin or disappeared,
the pimply faced fry-cooks, the truck drivers, the insurance clerks,
the college boys and the men all stood beside their guns and watched
Japanese swarm in hopping bowlegged crowds toward them or stared at
Geman tanks which moved fast across a grey landscape. Some of the men
stayed and held their fingers down on the trigger or dropped the shell
in the mortar or trained the gun, but others stood perfectly still,
caught in the ecstasy of complete and absolute fear.
The B-29 streaked down the long runway barely stirring up a swirl of dust
off the face of the clean concrete and finally lifted into the golden
California air. The plane flew over the hump of the ocean to Hawaii
and here it overtook the most backward part of the khaki wave. Here men
were living an almost normal life with highballs and almost white girls
and almost good whisky and almost normal weather. The plane fueled and
the crew ate Spam sandwiches and gulped ice water. The plane streaked
down another clean aseptic runway and headed for Johnston Island and
then touched at Kwajalein, Guam and finally Saipan. The B-29 flew over
the stretched-out middle part of the khaki wave, where men sweated over
typewriters and stacked boxes and painted ships and scraped tennis courts
at officers' clubs and made showers out of tin cans. Here was where the
khaki and material wave was the thickest; where the gear was heaped in
mountains and armies of men slowly loaded, shifted, loaded, unloaded
and reloaded the mountains of equipment. This was equidistant between
the normality of the rear and the madness of the forward, unprotected
fringe. And because the pressures here were the most equal the men were
the unhappiest.
The B-29 passed over the backward part of the wave and got almost to
the edges where the bloody froth was exploding and surging again. But
the plane stopped short of the fringe and waited for a few days.
Two weeks before, a cruiser had left San Francisco and crawled across
the ocean. Ahead of it pushed three destroyers that paced and tracked and
doubled back in a scientifically determined erraticness. The tropic sea
was hot and flat and only the horizon looked hazy and soft with puffed
clouds. On the cruiser a special Marine guard stood endlessly in front
of a locked up compartment. The Marines stood stone-faced on watch and
when relieved laughed carelessly at the questions of the sailors to hide
the fact that they too did not know what they were guarding.
Finally, days after the plane had landed at Saipan, the cruiser anchored
in the harbor at Guam. Now, suddenly, the ship was covered with cheerful
young scientists in new unwrinkled khakis. They were able to pass through
the cordon of Marines. These men knew nothing of military courtesy or
relative ranks and they pushed captains and colonels aside to fondle the
boxes, and behind their glasses their eyes glistened moistly and their
voices rose in sharp strained instructions as the boxes were lowered over
the side. The scientists climbed on the trucks with the boxes and hugged
them occasionally in a curious excess of excitement. They clapped one
another on the shoulders and usual cautious barriers between them were
melted for a while. On the cruiser the sailors and Marines watched the
excited scientists take the boxes and crates away.
"Well, Jesus Christ, they're only boxes," one said. Yeah, Jesus Christ,
the rest of the crew thought before they began to spray the ship with
salt water and clean up again.
In due time, the eager scientists assembled the contents of the boxes
into a long metal capsule of censored length and breadth and censored
weight. They deposited it beside the airfield and the young fliers
stopped eating their Spam sandwiches, and drinking powdered lemonade
and whisky and brought their plane up close to the long dun-colored
capsule. They were languid and calm, uninterested as the scientists
hovered about the bored ordnance men who trundled the capsule out to
the plane and finally snuggled it up into the belly of the B-29. And
there the sperm and ova of the new thing lay; separated by a few inches
of lead, but firmly planted in the stomach of the plane with her four
2200-horsepower engines and lead-computing sights, and stabilizers,
and pressurized cabins and masses of instruments.
The young scientists retired to the edge of the runway and squatted on
their heels. A few of them climbed into a second B-29. The first plane
turned slowly, aimed itself down the runway, and with a long smooth roar
was finally airborne. The second plane followed it. The two planes turned
north and, switching to automatic, began the flight for Japan.
The world wheeled by under the plane; the sea, an occasional speck of an
island, once a task force and finally the perfect lip of the horizon was
smeared, and then they saw the edge of Japan rising out of the ocean.
There was fog over the first target and so, without the people below
knowing, with a godly indifference, the plane turned and made for another
city. The city came to shape in the bombardier's sight. Far away and
microscopic, he saw the thin black squares, the parks, the broad line
of the river. The bombardier's fingers worked the knobs; wind drift,
plane speed, real wind, etc. His sights were not strong enough to see
people, so that when he squeezed the button and let the capsule fall
away in a long slanting spin, he only hoped that it would fall exactly
in the middle of the mosaic of lines and blocks. He put on the thick
black glasses given him by the scientists and pressed against a window
of the plane. The two planes were shaken as if a massive tuning fork
were vibrating inside of them. Through the thick black lens a flicker
of light penetrated.
Below the airplane, the tiny particles had come together in a rupturing
of heat and light. The light burnt hot on Japanese bodies. Some of the
Japanese were killed in the old way by flying stones and bashing their
heads against walls or being buried in collapsing walls. But many were
killed in a new strange way and simply stood and died gasping for air like
landed fish. In a fraction of a second people grew huge blisters on their
faces and hands. In some people the marrow of their bones dried suddenly
and produced no more corpuscles so that later they died from a cold or a
cut finger. But there was the comfort of enormity about it, the solace of
common disaster, the stability of ignorance. The shattered burnt bodies
nursed crisper, more broken bodies in a nightmare of pus-filled eyes,
skinless hands, dust-filled skies and a scarcity of water.
Lines of people walked by looking as if they had been dipped in slime
that had hardened slowly. "Look, they are in lines again," an old man,
squatting by the road, said. Others took up the cry. "Look, lines again.
They walk in correct lines," and suddenly all the wounded people felt
better.
"Good stuff," the crewman of the plane remarked. They took off their
dark glasses and began to tend the plane again. "Mighty good stuff. New
stuff, eh?"
The young scientists were pressed against the windows, their black
glasses off and their eyes startled and childlike. They watched the
shattered cloud of dust around the ground, heaving and swirling in
brown waves. Suddenly, out of the brown murk a pure white column climbed
clean and untarnished into the sky. At fifteen thousand feet it suddenly
spurted a pure and lovely mushroom further into the sky. It was as clean
and solid as marble, clear against the blue of the sky.
The youngest of the scientists felt his breath stop and a queer exultation
seized him. He dug his fingers against the sides of the plane for support
and his body was caught in a slow grinding orgasm as the perfect column
split the. sky. Minutes later when the wind had begun to shatter the sides
of the column and the mushroom was starting to lose its sharp clarity,
he pushed himself away from the side of the plane as if every muscle in
his body had been broken and hurried back to the tiny lavatory at the
rear of the plane.
Then, by some widespread and common agreement, the endless lines and
waves of men hesitated and paused and stopped fighting. The rest of it
was all done by words spoken by diplomats and statesmen.
No one was ready for it.
Now the huge brown wave of equipment and khaki started to roll backward,
starting slowly and then gradually speeding up, like a wide-lensed camera
suddenly beginning to run in reverse. The wave left behind it a rusty iron
fringe; the keen cutting edge began to corrode and rot. There were tanks
slowly turning red, quonset huts overrun by jungle, stacks of rotting food
in which a few pot-bellied natives and slim dashing parakeets picked,
beer cans melting into the mud. The long white strips of airfields grew
a fuzz of green that thickened and then finally swallowed the asphalt and
cement completely. The temporary docks rotted and sank into the ocean. The
only orderly thing left in the rich tropical chaos was the trim rows of
white crosses, row on row, marvelously neat and well laid out.
The men and boys making up the great wave went backward through the whole
process, but somehow the system worked poorly in reverse, the men changed
back slowly and reluctantly. They went through the reception centers, and
separation centers and interviews and were handed their manila envelopes
and turned loose. They put on flannel suits, corduroys, overalls, blue
business suits, sport coats, truck driver uniforms, but in all of them
there was the great sameness. The sameness did not come from fighting,
for even the men who sat on their buttocks for the entire war with their
feet on a desk had it. Cooks, telephone operators, control tower men,
transport pilots, radarmen, signalmen, they all had it. It was a way of
holding the head and opening the mouth to bitch and looking at women and
filling out papers and jealously guarding tiny areas of privilege, and
part of it was a childish petulance, and part of it was getting old too
fast, and part of it was the loneliness that men feel in a mob. But no
man could tell another about the sameness, and it took weeks and months
for it to disappear. Maybe the sameness disappeared when they stopped
eating the same starchy food that gave them plump faces or when they
stopped marching in column when they walked alone. But somehow the great
sameness did vanish, somehow all the men began to function on their own
nerves and brains again and in each man there was a day when he realized
that the sameness was gone and, at last, the wheel had come full round.
CHAPTER 16
End of the Invisible Hand
The Citrus Building was one of the oldest office buildings in Los
Angeles. By the Depression, it had grown decrepit and grimy. It was
noisy with the burr of dentists' drills and it stunk from the cigars
of cheap lawyers. The iron grill elevators moved slowly up and down.
The operators gradually stopped wearing uniforms and rolled their
sleeves up and smoked while they worked. The ledges of the building were
whitened by the droppings of the plump stately pigeons. Rents dropped. But
during the 1930's the town started moving west and tall sleek apartment
buildings went up around the Citrus Building. Wilshire Boulevard became
a fashionable and glittering street and the Citrus Building had an
entrance on Wilshire. After the war, a group of realtors bought and
redecorated it. It was painted black and gold. The pigeons remained but
their droppings were carefully washed away. On the top of the building
a great orange turned slowly and its green brass leaves were ten feet
long. The new elevators went smoothly and quickly. It became the most
fashionable business address in Los Angeles.
On the twelfth floor, Mike Freesmith looked out a window. A single sea
gull was suspended outside. It was motionless, frozen by some invisible
pressure of winds. Behind it, scaled down the sky, were four other gulls.
They were all motionless.
Must be a storm at sea, Mike thought. It's the only thing that brings
the gulls in. Usually there are only pigeons outside the building.
The gull had its pink withered feet tucked up beneath its belly. It closed
a leathery lid over the single eye that Mike could see. The small feathers
along the trailing edge of its wings shivered as the wind molded past
the gull's body.
"Would you like me to read back the last line?" Libby Matson said
behind him.