Fata Morgana

by Steven R. Boyett

“I went along with this because Jerry arranged it,” Farley said. “I figured if he of all people finally wanted it out there, I owe him at least that much. No one’ll believe it, but what do I care by now?” He gave his slanted smile. “The general there started squirming about the time my bomber flew over the rainbow.”

  General Andrews started to protest and Farley waved it off. “Hell, I’d’ve squirmed, too. Who wouldn’t?” Farley pointed at Kitchner. “But you didn’t even blink. Didn’t raise an eyebrow. Didn’t even look at the general to see if he was buying it. Do you know what you did do, ma’am?” He folded his hands over the twin metal handles of his cane and leaned forward in his folding chair. “You nodded.”

  Kitchner tucked the cable into a pocket of the camera’s case. “What’s your question, captain?”

  “Jerry never told our story to anybody. I’m as sure of that as anything I know. He left it up to me. He brought me here to tell it and he brought you here to hear it—and you weren’t surprised by a word of it. So my question is, Who are you really?”

  “Well.” She colored. “I’m not a spy, if that’s what you mean. My name is Doris Kitchner,” she said. “I’m a volunteer archivist for the Veterans History Foundation. Mainly I’m a history professor at Georgetown. My specialization is statistical methodology of the National Socialist Party.”

  “Nazi bookkeeping?” said Farley.

  “In a way. They were meticulous record-keepers.”

  “They were meticulous, all right.”

  “Yes. Well, five years ago a World War Two–era bunker was rediscovered near the Czech border. They still show up from time to time, even now. This particular bunker was full of records pertaining to Allied bombing raids on German targets. Defensive arrays, flak patterns, target strike rates, casualties, numbers of downed aircraft, that sort of thing. Like the Allies, the German military tried to learn from every bombing raid.”

  Farley spread his hands: So?

  “It was my good fortune to be involved in cataloging the bunker’s contents,” Kitchner continued. “But very soon after my work began there, the Air Force classified the project and brought in their own people. We—”

  “The U.S. Air Force?” Farley glanced at General Andrews, who shrugged.

  Kitchner nodded. “We were taken off the project and compensated for our time and made to sign nondisclosure agreements for sensitive but unclassified information.”

  “Gag orders.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “So what is it you’re not supposed to disclose?”

  Kitchner regarded Farley over the rims of her glasses. He stared back. She glanced at Andrews. The general put his hands up and said, “Hey, I can keep a secret.”

  Kitchner snorted. Then she adjusted her glasses and picked up her tablet and opened the cover. Andrews didn’t bother to hide his watching over her shoulder as she tapped the screen a few times and then swiped across it. She stopped. The general’s head craned forward and his mouth hung open like an ape beholding a magic trick. He put a hand to his mouth and he looked at Farley. “Holy god,” he said.

  Farley was about to make some smartassed comment when Kitchner worked the tablet again and held it out to him. A black-and-white image filled the screen. Farley leaned forward and saw mostly empty sky pockmarked by black wisps. A flak pattern, photographed from the ground.

  Farley looked up from the screen. “Am I missing something?” he asked.

  Kitchner set two fingers on the screen and zoomed the image until it showed an object blurred by motion and grainy with enlargement, but unmistakably a B-17 bomber in a steep dive, the ID number and nose art too motion-blurred to make out.

  Farley studied it for one deep breath, then set his jaw and glanced up at Kitchner. He could not read her expression. He looked past her at the general.

  “For christ’s sake,” Andrews told Kitchner. “Show him, already.”

  Wordlessly she dragged the plunging bomber to the bottom left of the screen.

  The upper right now showed some kind of monster pursuing the B-17. There was no other word for it. Outspread sail-like wings that were wider than the Flying Fortress. A dark gray body that was thinner but much longer. A diamond-shaped head with a long snout and angular pale patches that might have been eyes. A dark gap at the bottom of the head that might have been an air intake or a gaping mouth. As if the creature were trying to devour the plummeting aircraft. Or screaming in rage as its quarry fled. Beneath the thing’s left wing hung some kind of pod that might have been an engine.

  Farley felt a mortal chill. Even now, eight thousand miles and seventy years away, he heard the keening air across the straining wings. The stuttering clatter of the .50s back behind him. The whump of flak exploding in the air ahead. Even now.

  Farley reached for the tablet like a man receiving unsolicited commandments. Breathed fast as he regarded the plummeting shape he knew contained himself and nine other men. The arc of their lives beyond that captured moment. The estranging world beyond these walls. The unconveyable immensity still locked inside himself. The vindication in one impossible image. Here it is. Here it is at last.

  The screen timed out and Farley looked down on his darkly mirrored face. Old and tired and struggling for control. He looked up at Kitchner and held out the tablet and she took it back.

  “Thank you,” they both said at the same time. And laughed in surprise.

  “But how did Mr. Broben know to send me to record you?” Kitchner asked. “I never met him.”

  “The military buys a lot of hardware from Blue and Gray Technology,” General Andrews said. “I had a lot of business dealings with Jerry over the years. Some of it was highly classified systems. We both had top-secret clearance and a lot of connections.” He shrugged. “War hero, missions over Germany—something like this was bound to make its way to him.”

  “So Jerry sends Dr. Kitchner to hear our story because she’s the one person on earth with evidence to support it,” Farley said. “But he wanted you here, too.”

  “I have a pretty good idea why, now that I’ve heard your story,” Andrews said. He nodded at Kitchner. “And yours, doctor.”

  Kitchner frowned.

  Andrews leaned back in his chair. “When Jerry wasn’t trying to sell me technology from the future, he was beating me at poker and drinking my Pappy van Winkle’s. I would get him talking about the war, because my grandfather had flown out of Thurgood. He was a flight engineer on the Rude Awakening.”

  “Rude Awakening.” Farley frowned. “She went down over—” He stopped.

  “Over Zennhausen.” Andrews nodded. “I never met him. When I was growing up I was obsessed with the Fighting Forty-Ninth, and the Zennhausen mission in particular.” He shook his head. “I would pester Jerry all the time about it. He never let on there was anything odd about the mission, but some things about it just never made sense to me. The explosion was ten times the blast it should have been, even for a munitions plant. It went up like you dropped an A-bomb on it.”

  “We dropped a typhon on it. Maybe it amounts to the same thing.”

  “Maybe. But then Dr. Kitchner’s bunker showed up.” He looked at her. “Only one section of it was devoted to Allied bombing records,” he said. “The rest was highly classified information about the Zennhausen facility.”

  “You were one of the people who took over the project?” Kitchner asked.

  “No, ma’am. I only found out about it later, the same way Jerry did—through channels. People who knew my interests. I didn’t know about your picture. But I did find out the truth about Zennhausen.”

  Farley felt an odd misgiving, but he had to ask. “What about it?”

  Andrews glanced at Dr. Kitchner. “Most people know the Nazis were trying to build an atomic weapon,” he said. “They actually came close to building a working reactor, they just ran out of time.”

  “And Nazis.”

  “Yes, sir. But they were also trying to invent high-energy weapons. Very sophisticat
ed stuff—particle beams, directed-energy streams. Things we’ve only just learned how to build.”

  Farley’s hands shook on his cane. “Zennhausen wasn’t a munitions plant at all. Was it.”

  “No, sir,” said Andrews. “It was an energy-weapons lab.”

  “Energy-weapons lab,” Farley repeated dully.

  Andrews nodded. “Huge. Underground. Blast-hardened. Self-contained. Heavily defended. And way ahead of its time.” He spread his hands. “When I found out the truth I thought, well, now I know my grandfather’s death really meant something. Because who knows what might have happened if that mission had failed? What the Germans might have gone on to invent.”

  “Who knows?” Farley whispered.

  “You do, captain.” Andrews pointed at him. “Jerry knew. Your crew. And now I know, too. If that mission had failed, the war would have dragged on, escalated, overtaken everything. Until the Germans invented the locus.”

  Farley nodded. Heart pounding.

  Andrews leaned forward. “You and your crew didn’t blow up a munitions plant. You prevented the future you had just escaped. You saved billions of lives.”

  Farley saw it. The jewel-like symmetry of it. The explosion hadn’t just destroyed the locus. It had destroyed the facility that would have built the locus.

  Ever since the Mission Farley had worried about what might emerge from the knowledge they’d brought back, feared the discovery of the thing they had really dropped over Germany. A force immeasurably more destructive than any mere bomb. A thing that had reached across time to achieve its goals. But by attempting to manipulate events to guarantee its existence, it actually had prevented its own creation. Unmade the future Farley had seen.

  All those years of lonely silence. All that private fear. All the awful dreams and sleepless nights. And all of it suddenly redeemed. They had prevented the end of the world. For one brief moment of raw apprehension Farley’s troubled soul was given peace.

  But he could not stop his mind from following the implications of the general’s revelation, and fleeting redemption fell beneath the relentless machinery of consequence. Because Farley realized that by preventing that future, he and his crew also had eliminated the typhons, the doomsday crater, the Redoubt, the Dome—and Wennda.

  A white-hot flare ignited in his chest. He fell back in his chair.

  “Captain?” he heard Dr. Kitchner ask. “Are you all right?” From far away he watched the cane shake in his hands. Wake turbulence. The vortex left by the passage of something huge.

  There had been no other proper course to take. One man’s heart could not be weighed against the human race.

  And yet. And yet.

  Wennda.

  Farley gripped his cane and fought inside himself.

  All his life he’d held on to her eventuality. That she existed someday up ahead was a balm at least against the pain of not being able to find a way back to her. And now at last he knew he hadn’t found it because it wasn’t there. Had been unmade along with so much else. Wennda.

  His hands would not stop shaking.

  Don’t you dare lose your ship, Captain Midnight. Not now. Not after all this. It was seventy years ago, you stupid sap. You’ve steered through worse a dozen times and you’re still here. It’s just wake turbulence. Power up, push through, roll off. Do it. Soldier through, god damn it.

  Cold sweat chilled him. He loosened his collar and held up a hand. “Just give me a minute,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry,” Andrews said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I thought—I was sure this was why Mr. Broben wanted me here.”

  “It is,” Farley said. He coughed into his fist. He pointed at the water pitcher and Dr. Kitchner poured the rest into the glass and handed it to him, not letting go until he’d brought it to his mouth. “It’s why all of us are here.” He set the glass back on the little table and looked at the general and the professor. “We had the missing piece to each other’s puzzles, and Jerry saw it. The big picture. God I miss him.” He shook his cane at the ceiling of the tent. “I got you into a church after all, you son of a bitch.”

  *

  Outside the E-Z Up Farley looked out on the enormous airplane hangar. The other tents were being taken down, their contents hauled away by BGT employees driving Signature Edition Sammy Juniors, mini versions of the forklift model their inventor had stolen from the future. Away went Veterans Day displays of flight suits and A-2 jackets and crush caps, mounted photographs of bomber crews and fighter pilots and aerial combat, machine guns and medals and flags.

  At the far end of the hangar, near the Blue and Gray Technology Gulfstream that had brought him here, the huge swing orchestra was packing up. The circulating crowd and shouting children tugging patriotic balloons had dwindled to stragglers. A few hours ago long lines had snaked around the airfield, waiting patiently to tour the vintage aircraft despite the cold gray overcast November day. Because how often does a major corporation debut a mint-condition World War II warbird collection that its founders had maintained in a private hangar for decades?

  Farley shook his head and smiled, thinking about Jerry and Wen and the surprise their company had unveiled today. A secret basement project that only outrageously wealthy men could have made a hobby of.

  The Bonniker & Broben Collection looked as if it had rolled off the assembly line this afternoon. The Mustang fighter parked inside the hangar by the Aerial Combat display should have had a ribbon and a bow on it. The Mitchell and the Liberator bombers squatting off the taxiway looked like they’d been garaged straight from the factory. The C-47—a tireless draft horse Farley had learned to love during the Berlin Airlift—looked cherry as a showroom sedan.

  And the main attraction just outside the hangar entrance. Even now his heartbeat quickened when he looked at her.

  His hand went to the envelope in his breast pocket, but the tent panel rustled and Dr. Kitchner emerged, pulling her wheeled brown valise like a lapdog on a leash.

  “Oh, good, I was afraid you’d already gone,” she said. “Where’s the general?”

  Farley pointed at the row of blue Porta-Potties along the side wall. “Duty calls,” he said.

  “Oh.” Kitchner frowned. “Well, I really must leave.” She held out a hand. “Captain, it has been a unique honor. Thank you. For—well, everything.”

  Farley shook her hand. “One more question, doc,” he said.

  Kitchner nodded uncertainly.

  “Do you think if we learn from the future, maybe we won’t repeat it?”

  She smiled and looked startled at the same time. “As long as there are people like you in the world, captain,” she replied, “I feel certain of it.” She grabbed the telescoping handle of her valise. “Give my regards to the general. I really do have to go.”

  “Have a safe trip,” said Farley. He grinned. “And a good life.”

  Kitchner blinked up at him. “You really are quite tall,” she said.

  Farley was still watching the valise trail behind her when Andrews came up beside him.

  “Sorry I didn’t say goodbye,” the general said.

  “She asked me to give her regards,” said Farley. “Think she has a plane to catch.”

  A young woman heading toward the hangar with an empty wheelchair waved cheerfully at Kitchner as she went from the structure’s dusk into the waning day.

  Farley turned toward Andrews. “Think she’ll sell that video to the History Channel?” he asked.

  The general laughed. “I think she’ll just turn it in to the archives.”

  “Does anyone ever watch those?”

  “I sure as hell hope so.”

  Farley snorted. “So is the Air Force officially done with me?” he asked.

  The general turned to face him. “Captain Farley,” he replied, “I believe it is.” He saluted. “And I have never been more sincere when I say thank you for your service.”

  Farley returned the salute without thinking, back straight, shoulders square, eyes fron
t, pain forgotten. His eyes stung and he swallowed. “Sir,” he said.

  Andrews broke the salute and nodded at the girl with the wheelchair, who had stopped a respectful distance away. “Looks like your ride’s here,” he said.

  “I thought it was yours.” Farley waved at the girl and she nodded and headed to them with the wheelchair. Farley let himself be helped aboard. He settled his cane against his leg and looked up at the general. “One more roll,” he said.

  Andrews nodded soberly. “One more roll,” he replied, and toasted Farley with an invisible glass.

  Farley regarded him a moment, then decided hell with it. “What else did they find in that bunker?” he asked.

  The general raised an eyebrow. “As far as I know it’s still classified,” he replied.

  “Well. I guess that answers that.”

  Andrews nodded at Farley’s cane. “I keep meaning to ask you,” he said. “That’s a B-17 throttle, isn’t it?”

  Farley held the cane up before him. It was cherry wood, brass-banded near the tip, with an unusual F-shaped aluminum handle. Farley smiled at it, fond and knowing and sad.

  “Goodnight, general,” he said. Then he looked back at the girl and pointed the cane forward, and the wheelchair began to move.

  *

  Jerry had given him the cane at one of the crew reunions, Farley couldn’t remember which one. Wen had made the handle from the Morgana’s left-hand throttle lever, Jerry’d told him.

  Farley had hefted the cane, loving it instantly. You sure you guys can spare it? he had asked.

  You do grateful lousy, Broben had replied.

  *

  “How are you doing, sir?” the young woman asked as she wheeled Farley across the hangar.

  “I’m fine,” said Farley. “Just taking it all in.”

  “The crowd was so much bigger than we expected. And you were great, the reporters loved you.” Farley could hear her broad smile. “Can I get you anything?” she asked.

  Farley nodded at the aircraft parked outside the hangar entrance. “You can get me over there, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Glad to.”

  Farley kept his gaze on the familiar shape ahead as his hand went to his breast pocket and pulled out the Blue and Gray Technology envelope, the folded gray paper. He unfolded it and held it on his lap and closed his eyes and breathed in deep.