Trinity's Child

by William Prochnau

  Kazaklis felt so good, having survived green out flawlessly, that he began whistling exuberantly as he paused. O beautiful, for spacious skies . . . The tension oozed out, bringing the dull throb of a hangover just above the level of consciousness, reminding him also that he had played early into the dawn after the two-a.m. closing of the Boom-Boom Room in the High Pine Lounge near his isolated place of work. His fingers, as usual, had been quite adept at the after-hours play, too. He continued whistling at the brief intrusion of the thought. . . . for amber waves of grain . . .

  Behind him, Moreau muttered audibly. Halupalai had fixed his eyes on the window vista again.

  Kazaklis was aware of neither. The tension began to surge back, the silver captain's bars rising, the Strategic Air Command's lightning bolt stretching into an attack poise. The hangover ebbed, leaving him with a fleeting thought about the irritations of the PRP regulations. Officially, with the Personnel Reliability Program taken literally—which it was, being the regulation governing the fitness of those, like him, with hands on nuclear weapons—he was not EWO ready. He dismissed the thought. He was the best they had. They knew it; he knew it. He had just performed perfectly. On green out. Which was low level. Which was where he was supreme. Which was what it was all about, taking his big lumbering B-52 down on ground-hugging nuclear-bombing practice missions.

  In his most recent practice run, Kazaklis had commanded his Buff for eight hours on night low-level, the ultimate test. He had gone out with the same slight nag, the Jack Daniel's gone from his system but his system not quite having forgotten the Jack Daniel's. He had flown after the same kind of mostly sleepless night with one of Spokane's awe-struck lovelies, different girl that time, but the fingers and other gear working just as deftly. He had found the target precisely, evaded the computer-simulated SAM missiles expertly. He had come back exhilarated. It had been his brain, sending those light-speed signals to his fingers, that moved his huge craft ten degrees left, five degrees right; moved the great plaything of his B-52 around western buttes and mesas and down long, narrow gorges that remained inky black until the moon peeped briefly over a ridge and glittered spookily off the snow below. Three hundred feet below, racing past at five hundred miles an hour. The moon also glittered off the canyon walls just beyond his wingtip. The walls flashed up above him, closed off in front. High terrain at twelve o'clock, Tyler radioed from below. The radio voice crackled. Ten degrees left, careening over the frozen riverbed, the moon gone now, the wall ahead disappearing into the black night, only the dim red glow of his radar screen telling Kazaklis it still was there, giving way to the safe tunnel of the river gorge that his brain told his fingers to follow. Red screens in darkness, better for night vision; green screens in daylight.

  The screen was green now, the pause over, the garishly yellow computer letters disappearing, a formation of adversaries lining up, eleven across and five deep, moving to a hum-dum-a-dum narcotic beat.

  Kazaklis came to full alert, although it took added effort. This part was tedious, just like the duty he had begun today. Dull. Sit and wait. Howling klaxons, the top-speed sprint to his nuclear-armed plane. Engines on. Sit and wait. Engines off. Just to show the Russians they were ready. Always. Then back to the alert bunker and wait. He wasn't in it for this. He was in it for low level and the sheer flier's joy of snaking the biggest bomber in the American Air Force down western canyons, granite just off his wingtips, his mind transforming the American deserts into the steppes of Russia, his imagination making the Missouri River the Volga or the Lena.

  His fingers moved automatically, this being a trip of his trained mind, too—blip, blip, blip—-carving out one row of adversaries, then another. Kazaklis long ago had broken down the adversaries' computer program, learned the secret of the count, filed away the pattern of their attack and all its variations. He had done this exactly as his SAC colleagues had broken down the computer programs of the heat-seeking SAM missiles that would come up at him, just as they had cracked the secrets of the MIG's he could expect north of the Beaufort Sea, just as they had probed and adjusted for the radar defenses he could expect near the entry point over the Arctic islands, Novosibirskie Ostrova. Exactly as the Russians, after more than thirty years, had learned and adjusted for every secret of the B-52. But he would never see the entry point, never see the deep lake so far inside Siberia. Not even if he went there, went for a million.

  He was on the count, ready for the bonus shot at the command ship, when Moreau brushed past him. The distraction was minor, but fatal. Instead of the bonus shot, a lone adversary caught him just as his brain frantically signaled hard right. The explosion resounded through the computer screen.

  “She-e-e-e-it!” Kazaklis exploded in unison with the machine.

  He glared at Moreau.

  Moreau's face wore the slightest smile of satisfaction.

  “You, Kazaklis, are a fuck-up,” the copilot said to the pilot, sensing that nothing could be more demeaning.

  Kazaklis bristled instantly, the eagle's talons flexing. Then he grinned from ear to ear, knowing his crew member's vulnerabilities far better.

  “And what you need, Moreau,” he said through the gleaming white teeth that worked so well in the Boom-Boom Room, “is a good fuck!”

  Moreau turned quickly away. The green screen flashed a computer message: Game Over.

  Far to the south a young American lieutenant, new to the bowels of Cheyenne Mountain, watched the Canadian officer's screen in fascination, distracted from his own.

  Blip.

  The little spasm from the lieutenant's own screen, trained on a patch of ocean in the Georgia Banks off New England, caught the corner of his eye. Blip. Blip. Blip. Next to him, on a third screen, the blips emerged almost simultaneously off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Another screen did a staccato dance from a patch of the Pacific beyond Catalina in Southern California.

  The general watched his men cross-check computer printouts. But he knew what they showed—many zeroes, computer code for missile launches—and knew that already the printouts were being dispersed to more than one hundred strategic sites around the world, setting a preliminary attack conference into motion. This had happened 147 times in the past two years. He pushed a button that changed the alert code from Apple Jack to Lemon Juice.

  The general sighed and shook his head slightly. Damned computers. And he waited.

  In the alert room Halupalai stared into the window, but he did not see its western vista. Instead, he saw a handful of Dali clouds dancing beneath his feet far below over the verdant jungles of Vietnam. The gunner, oldest of the crew Kazaklis commanded, had retreated, as he often did, into the past. From the serenity of his tail bubble, the sky lay beneath him, the heavens everywhere but up. Gossamer wisps of cirrus floated just beyond his fingertips. Endless and placid, unearthly blue in its paleness, the sky surrounded and enveloped him. There was no bliss like this. Halupalai had found himself.

  He could understand Gagarin: I am eagle! He could understand Borman approaching the edge of the moon: In the beginning . . . He was free. He was unfettered. He was alone.

  Even the words, echoing preternaturally through his bubble, were part of the splendid solitude.

  “Twenty seconds. Ready, ready. Now.”

  The words came from afar, not disruptively. They, too, were part of his realm, no tension to them. He watched for the first gray globule they signaled. It came quickly, followed rapidly by a stream. The bombs floated downward, wafting like gray feathers, tumbling gently through the cirrus, growing tiny and innocent and natural and good as they descended into the cotton-candy clouds far below.

  Halupalai felt his world begin to tilt, arch gracefully on its side in a wide sweeping turn toward home. So well was Halupalai attuned to his world and its own special rhythms that he saw the first glint of the intruder almost simultaneously with the huge B-52's radar operator who sat with the rest of the crew far ahead of Halupalai's tail-gun bubble. Suddenly Halupalai's quiet world erupte
d into raw chaos. Still, he watched almost passively, fascinated, as the missile soared upward. Then he broke into uncontrollable rage. The intruder scarred his landscape, raped his world. His brown hands turned white in their grip on the fifty-caliber machine gun, the electric jolts of the gun pulsing through his arms as he fired and fired.

  Halupalai's bullets impacted on nothing, the strafe racing invisibly into his heavens, randomly and futilely, never meant for an intruder like this. The SAM missile raced nearer, its outline growing more menacing as its outline clarified. The gunner fired relentlessly, without meaning or hope but in outrage and frustration at the sacrilege. The B-52 groaned in the desperate strain of its effort at evasion.

  Halupalai stopped firing, his arms limp. He watched the missile race toward him, catching only a shark flash as it soared by toward the starboard engines, and he reached for the ejection lever that would cast him into the now hostile sky over Vietnam.

  The explosion snapped Halupalai out of his reverie. He saw Moreau brush past Kazaklis, heard the thunderclap inside the green computer screen, heard Moreau's taunt and then heard Kazaklis thunder back. He relaxed, the tension gone from the memory of his ecstasy gone wrong.

  Halupalai watched Kazaklis flash the toothy smile, the same one he used in the Boom-Boom Room to lure woman after woman to his side. He saw the commander slip another quarter in the old Space Invaders computer game which he played as relentlessly as Halupalai had once fired his gun.

  The big Hawaiian also watched as Moreau turned and moved away, past the poker tables and chess sets, away from Kazaklis and the row of computer games in the game room the Air Force had provided for its bored nuclear warriors. She was framed briefly against the panoramic picture window looking out on a western plateau, pine trees blurring into the purple haze of a far-off mountain range, the sun setting majestically and spreading multicolored rays across the land. He had lived this life so long that the window did not strike him as unusual. Curtains were drawn back to the edges of the scene. The fact that it was nighttime and midwinter, the window showing sunset and autumn, did not jar him. There were no windows in this hardened bunker, braced inadequately against megatons. The picture window was a painting, perfect in its three-dimensional concept, designed to give them all a homey illusion of reality. It did not strike him as odd. He did not think of it at all.

  Moreau swept out the door, her head passing under the alarm klaxon. She retreated quickly toward her quarters after the pilot's remark, hoping she had not shown her agitation. She disliked him intensely. He was a woman-user, which put her at a distinct disadvantage, because she was a man-user. Not quite in the same way, but close enough.

  Normally she kept her emotions under rigid control. Even with Kazaklis. Even knowing he was hung-over after a sleepless night and still could perform nearly flawlessly. It was immensely frustrating, knowing that Kazaklis could break all the rules and get away with it. It wasn't the game that had set her off. She felt superior to Kazaklis on that, because she had gone beyond him. It was his whistling, the infernally joyous whistling. Of “America the Beautiful,” for God's sake. As if he indeed were saving the world as his butt swayed right, then left, in the rhythmic chase of the little aliens on his green screen.

  Moreau had played the game, too—attacking it methodically and mercilessly. Early on, Moreau had broken the game's computer program and learned the secret of the count. Soon Moreau learned the secret of green out, the secret of moving in so tightly on your adversaries, allowing them to move in so tightly on you— just as she was trained to do skimming treetops in her giant B-52—that the adversaries couldn't see you, couldn't kill you. If you were good. It was a valuable piece of knowledge. But to Kazaklis that seemed to be the final secret and he had stopped there, which was a telling shortcoming in Moreau's eyes. Moreau had gone further. She had learned the secret of the narcotic. At great cost. And with seemingly little practical value, which irritated Moreau further because she was in a very practical profession and she knew the secret of the narcotic was part of that profession as well. Moreau had stopped playing the computer game after learning the ultimate secret. She had not stopped playing her professional game after learning its secret. Knowing is not curing. She thought briefly of her father. Then she hurried on down the hallway to her room.

  Inside, she sprawled across the bunk in the room she shared with a woman tanker pilot. The room, deep in the bunker, was different from the others. The fortress, the men called it. A fortress within a fortress. Her roommate did not like the way Moreau had decorated it, particularly the picture of the medieval chastity belt she had stretched across the door. Inside, the mock Playgirl centerfold of Edward Teller completely confused the other woman. As did the full-color photo of a mushroom Moreau had planted between Teller's scrawny legs. Her roommate was complaining again, which, at the moment, Moreau didn't even want to try to handle.

  “Why don't you take that silly thing down?” the roommate pleaded, gesturing at the mushroom.

  “What have you got against a climax, dear?”

  “Yours or his, Moreau?”

  “Ours.”

  The other woman looked at Moreau blankly. She didn't get it. An orgasm with Edward Teller? Sick. An orgasm with her? Not so sick. But after living six months with Moreau, the tanker pilot was quite sure that wasn't the meaning.

  She did understand the map. Everyone had one of those. The rest of the 92nd Bombardment Wing kept the maps in their minds. Only Moreau had spread one above her bunk. Only a woman could get away with that, enjoying the base commander's discomfort every time he brought a visiting VIP into the fortress. Women in the Strategic Air Command were a recent phenomenon, women in nuclear-combat B-52's very recent, and every visiting senator, every visiting newspaper reporter had to check in on the ladies of SAC. They usually laughed at the chastity belt, quickly averted their eyes from the mushroom between Teller's varicose veins, and riveted on the map.

  “An attack flight plan?” the most recent visitor, a senator from Vermont, had asked the commander.

  “A joke, senator,” the commander had replied uneasily. “A common joke. These are not easy places, the B-52 bases and the ICBM bases. Prime targets. We call them the First Good-Bye, Bull's Eye, Ten Strike.”

  He shot a withering glance at Moreau's passive face.

  The map did contain a flight plan. It showed a B-52 heading north, up toward the pole and the adversaries beyond, then diverting and making a beeline for Tahiti. It was a common joke. Everyone had an island, and the big bomber, which could pull ten thousand miles with refueling, had the range. No one was serious, least of all Moreau, an Air Force brat raised on all this, with a SAC general for a father. General Moreau was retired now, but he had been something. Still was. The coldest of the cold warriors, the press had called him as she grew up. She knew another side. But he had been a looming national figure for a generation, a natural and more sophisticated successor to SAC's legendary General LeMay. She grew up determined to follow in his footsteps. Still, she delighted in exploiting the other side of the sexual double standard. The commander would never say a word to her about the map—not because she was General Moreau's kid but because she was a woman. She knew that. And she used it.

  Inside the mountain, an orange light had begun flashing. The general stared at it, perplexed.

  Beneath him, at a new bank of computers, still another watcher was flipping his screen on and off, then pulling the picture in tight for magnification. The screen showed flexing molars, like computer-game aliens. They represented silo doors opening at Polyarnny, the Soviets' northernmost—and nearest—land-based missile field on the Arctic edge of the Barents Sea.

  The general flicked Lemon Juice to Snow Man and reached to his right. The last time it had gone this far, back in 1980, he thought unhappily, some idiot had slipped a training tape into the main computer bank. Nice exercise, scrambling fighter pilots north over Canada. Bad politics, with the Russians sending hostile notes and the general giving his least
satisfactory performance before the Senate. His right hand paused briefly, his peripheral vision catching the three stars on his shoulder. This is no way to get the fourth, he thought.

  Then his hand picked up the direct-line phone. He had many ways to communicate with Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha, far across the fruited plain. But the telephone still was best.

  In the Fairchild bunker, Halupalai quietly watched Kazaklis begin another assault on the aliens. He knew that Kazaklis, the ultimate SAC jet jockey oozing all the near-perfect animal instincts that once had drawn the world to him, too, and Moreau, the kind of woman that always attracted Halupalai but whom he never could attract, were a somewhat dangerous combination in their hostility. He knew how many directions those sparks could fly, how many different fires they could ignite inside the claustrophobic confines of a B-52. He also knew a lot about the Personnel Reliability Program. After Vietnam, PRP had worried him. He was afraid it would get him, and he wanted to stay in the wonderful cocoon of his B-52, even though the exhilarating tail bubble was gone, victim of another technological advance.

  He had gone the psychotherapy trip, required after his Vietnam experience, the depression was so deep. A potency crisis, natural to men in war, natural to a man who had found his only function to be not enough, the shrink had said. No sweat, pal. It will pass. But he had sweated. He wanted to be part of the post-Vietnam Air Force world. He studied PRP. He knew how it was linked to being EWO ready, how crucially the Air Force viewed the combination. He knew that men had been bumped out of nuclear missions because they were taking antihistamines or fighting with their wives. He knew that crews were expected to look for flaws in their buddies, to turn them in for the security of all, look for the little quirks that meant they might rebel or question too much or crack up around all the weapons, or simply not go at the moment of truth. He could quote at length from the regs of the Personnel Reliability Program established to maintain sanity even if the situation were not sane.