Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  That, of course, didn’t account for the trembling or the sweating. Theo’s deep, soft, musical laugh drifted in through the curtains; Martine went back still again and looked out. Theo had turned around, his pleasant face, creased now with laughter, was bathed in the bright glow of the umbrella.

  Martine’s hands went up to his forehead, the palms pushing hard against his eyeballs. He felt weak, he thought that he might fall. He stood still for a time, afraid that if he opened his eyes and tried to take a step his legs would buckle. When he did finally move, his feet felt heavy, they dragged, it was like walking through water, but he managed to make it to the desk. He took up his pen and wrote in his notebook, over and over again: “October 19, 1972, October 19, 1972.” Then he buried his head in his arms and, sickeningly, remembered.

  October 19, 1972. He could reconstruct it pretty accurately. It had started the night before, October 18. He’d been without sleep, except for cat naps at odd moments, for close to four days, operating almost continually. The flying hospital unit was stationed for the moment in Central Africa: Belgian Congo, somewhere northwest of Stanleyville. Up north there’d been a head-on collision between one of the biggest American air fleets and an equally big Russian one; for three days a tremendous dogfight had been going on in the skies all the way from Morocco to the Libyar. Desert, with thousands of planes being blown to bits and practically all the inhabited areas beneath being pulverized.

  That was how the war went in those days: the fleets would cruise about, each under orders from its own EMSIAC, then they’d meet and open up on each other. The idea was to knock enemy planes out and bomb any installations on the ground that seemed to be used by the enemy or might be of potential use to him. Naturally, the casualties were terrific. Whenever possible, helicopters would go in and try to rescue the downed airmen, and if they were wounded but still alive they’d be given emergency treatment and flown to the nearest mobile hospital unit. So Martine’s outfit got most of the casualties from North Africa. The brain-surgery cases, of course, were routed over to Martine and Helder and their crew: the skull-duggery boys. They kept at it until the instruments were about falling out of their hands.

  Toward evening on October 18, they brought Babyface in. He was as bad a mess as Martine had ever seen, bad as you can get without being a corpse. The head injury was serious enough: the whole cranium had been ripped open by a fragment of shrapnel from the eyebrows down past the ears. To complicate things, both of the kid’s legs had been snapped off neatly above the knees—that had happened, apparently, in a crackup somewhere around Tunis, when he was already unconscious from the cranial wounds.

  It was a miracle that he was alive, he’d lost a lot of blood. But those helicopter rescue squads were good, they’d snatched him off the ground, pumped a lot of plasma and whole blood into him plus some cortisone and ACTH derivatives, doused him with penicillin and anti-bleeding chemicals, and shipped him down south by emergency jet plane to be fixed up good as new. He was still unconscious when they brought him in: respiration ragged, pulse awfully spotty, Martine didn’t give him a chance.

  While the kid was being prepared for surgery, purely as a matter of routine, Martine did the usual thing—went through his papers to check his identification, medical record, blood type, etc. He was stunned by what he found.

  Babyface had a pretty remarkable background for a twenty-year-old, and not just medically: he was, for one thing, America’s most famous ace of World War III. From the clippings in his wallet Martine learned that, single-handed, he had eliminated more enemy cities than any other five airmen put together, he had to his credit the destruction of Chungking, Warsaw, Paris, Johannesburg, and several other great cosmopolitan centers.

  Martine kept trying to think as he read the clippings: How does it feel to know you erased Paris? Funny: he was a good-looking, raw-boned youngster, as nearly as you could judge from the scorched and blood-caked face, indistinguishable from millions of other American kids, and still when you looked at him you knew that he had certainly killed several million people with a few flicks of the wrist. By this time they were using H-bombs by the crate, including the delayed-action type which goes on spewing radioactivity over a wide area for a long time. And, when wind conditions were good, these were supplemented with radiological-warfare dust, RW dust. So that one efficient airman could knock out a whole cosmopolitan population pretty thoroughly.

  But that wasn’t Babyface’s only claim to fame. Among his papers there was also a card which indicated that he’d been a leading member of Tri-P, the pacifist movement called the Peace Pledge Program which had been so active before the war. Helder, when he had roomed with Martine in New York, had been one of the organizers of Tri-P, he’d always been after the other students to join.

  That was surprising about Babyface. Obviously, in some idealistic spurt during his student days just two or three years before, he’d been revolted enough by the idea of war to have joined this movement which was sweeping the youth and to have signed its pledge “never to participate in any war whatsoever under any circumstances whatsoever.” Even more, he’d been so much in earnest about the thing that he’d made quite a name for himself as a campaigner for peace at all costs—there were some clippings about that, too. Three years later, how many millions of notches did he have carved on his bombsight?

  Martine couldn’t resist showing the clippings to Helder. A look of horror came into Helder’s eyes, he went over and studied the kid’s face more carefully. “My God,” he said shakily. “Sure, it’s Teddy Gorman. I’ve spoken from the same platform with him a hundred times. I didn’t recognize him on account of the blood.”

  “Take a good look,” Martine said. “Observe the life cycle of the pacifist.”

  They were both out on their feet but even so Martine felt like baiting Helder, and Helder felt like arguing about it; he was never one to look an irony full in the face without blinking.

  “What’s it prove?” he said.

  “Nothing much. Just that people are glad to be pacifists—in between wars.”

  Martine was thinking, too, about the movement initiated by students before World War II, the movement around the Oxford Peace Pledge. It was before his time but he’d read about it, matter of fact Tri-P was pretty much a revival of the Oxford idea.

  “This is no reflection on the philosophy of pacifism,” Helder insisted. “It only shows that up to now pacifist movements have been inefficient, tactically and programmatically.”

  “Sure,” Martine said, “and for a very good reason. Look at this baby-faced mass murderer. Like all good pacifists, he was ready to sign the peace-at-any-price pledge at the drop of a slogan. And, two years later, to sprinkle H-bombs around at the drop of a slightly different slogan. Doesn’t that suggest there’s a certain gap between slogans—yours, anyhow—and motives? That people are a bit more complex and ambivalent than you merchants of good will recognize?”

  “People are fundamentally simple—at the core of any man is the simplest thing of all, a great fund of good will. We just have to find the words that will reach that simple core and activate it.”

  “Onward and upward!” Martine said. “If you’ll excuse a wisecrack at such a time, maybe you should change that idea of progress to unword and upward. Your words only get people to agree not to fight when there isn’t any fighting to be done.”

  “I’ll grant you that we’ve got to do some serious thinking about how to extend the emotional appeal of our program,” Helder said. “We’re in a difficult transitional period.”

  From up forward came the clear steely rat-a-tat of the EMSIAC receiver.

  “While you’re at it,” Martine said, “think about how to extend the emotional appeal of your program to you and me. I’d like to point out that at this precise transitional moment the two of us are not especially active in advancing the brotherhood of man. As I get the picture, we’re somewhere in the Belgian Congo, on orders of EMSIAC, patching up soldiers’ skulls because that’s w
hat EMSIAC wants us to do.”

  “Our movement isn’t finished. Transitions are always hard to ride out. After this war we’ll find a way to counter the propaganda of the war-makers.”

  Martine had to laugh at the flamboyance of the remark. Just two days before, word had reached their unit to the effect that the entire Eastern seaboard back home, from the Massachusetts coast down to Baltimore, had been pretty systematically laid waste in a mass H-bomb attack. Way over twenty million people had been killed or wounded, in spite of extensive civilian evacuation (delayed-action radioactivity and RW dust no doubt accounted for many of the casualties), and this followed on the heels of a similar attack on the West Coast, which had been reduced to a mass of rubble from San Diego to above Puget Sound. Already the population back home had been cut down by much more than a third, and the end wasn’t yet in sight. Who could tell? Very possibly Martine’s family and friends, and Helder’s too, were now distributed in dainty shreds over some vast radioactive landscape, atomized at last into tranquillity.

  “Noble words,” Martine said. “Let’s hope the war-makers leave a few people around for you to propagandize.”

  He handed Babyface’s wallet to an assistant. Then he couldn’t help adding, “The hitch is, it’s hard to tell just who these war-makers of yours are any more. By the looks of things these days, just about everybody makes war. Or do you see some stout-hearted pacifist standing up to EMSIAC and telling it off?”

  By this time the kid was ready for surgery; they both took some energy pills, then Helder got to work on the stumps and Martine went at the head.

  For over three hours Martine’s hands were probing around inside that mashed skull. He tried some daring techniques—he thought it was hopeless anyhow, what was there to lose?—experimental procedures that he’d never attempted before on anything but laboratory animals. His crew men stood around in amazement, it was one of his better efforts, a real virtuoso bit of protoplasmic tailoring. Several times the respiration bags went limp and the pulse disappeared, but with oxygen, digitalis and a dozen other things they managed to bring him back each time.

  While his fingers maneuvered around in the head, Martine’s mind was racing. The side of him that worked for EMSIAC did its job, and brilliantly. The other side hadn’t yet been spotted and given its marching orders by EMSIAC, and it was thinking: Why in hell bother? Why not just let him die? Why not let them all die?

  It wasn’t enough to say that Babyface had been sloganized into doing what he’d done; you still had to consider his susceptibility to slogans. Because even Babyface was more than a morally neutral robot, he didn’t simply carry out EMSIAC’S instructions, before he carried them out he had to acquiesce to carrying them out. What Martine wanted to know was, where could this acquiescence be tracked down in this pacifist-homicidal brain—if somebody would only tell him, he would go after it immediately with his scalpel. He wanted to know what incisions to make in order to produce a brain which would say no to EMSIAC. As soon as this thought hit him, sweat began to roll down from his forehead. It wasn’t only the heat or the exhaustion. No, his next thought was: I don’t say no to EMSIAC either, I just abstractly, therapeutically, approve of the idea. . . .

  The next minute—by this time he was fitting the tantalum plate which the lab technicians had prepared into Babyface’s skull—he snapped back a little, saw a partial answer to his questions. Somewhere in this lacerated cortex, in some associational cluster he wasn’t skillful enough to locate, was also a set of pathways which were loaded with idealism and good will and devotion to noble causes like Tri-P. This side of the brain didn’t bulk very large against the more deeply rooted aggressions: the fondle networks are always dwarfed by the fight networks: the pacifism only came into play during lulls, standstills and interregnums, when nobody had any use for the aggression. The surgical problem, then, was one of liberating the pacifist networks so that they couldn’t be immediately blocked off by the violent ones the moment some EMSIAC sounded the bugle call.

  As soon as he put it to himself that way he saw that it was not a surgical problem: nobody could ever know enough about these contraries in the brain to amputate the one without crippling the other. Maybe the truth was that you couldn’t cut the ambivalence out of a human organism without hacking up every single cell in it, one by one. So knives were out. He couldn’t do anything but sew Babyface up again and set him loose to prowl for more Parises. He wasn’t God, he was only a patcher. You had to be a Helder to think you were God. . . .

  That night he couldn’t sleep; his eyes wouldn’t close, although they smarted from exhaustion. For three or four miserable hours he sat huddled in his bunk, listening to EMSIAC clacking up front, listening to Helder snore away just above him. For a while he tried to read, a passage from Wiener, a few lines from Rimbaud. Then he opened his diary and began making notes.

  He wrote for a long time, putting down all the ideas that had tumbled through his head when he’d been operating on Babyface, trying to escape that infernal snore. The jottings were pretty wild and bitter—among other things there was some sort of imaginary dialogue with Babyface that rambled on interminably.

  From time to time he stopped writing and thought idly about his folks, such as they were: his father, who was dead: his mother, from whom he’d always held himself aloof, whom he hadn’t seen for years: Irene, who’d divorced him right after he’d gone into the service, after months of estrangement; Tom, the son he’d never even seen—born just after the divorce, when Martine was already on overseas duty with the medical corps. He couldn’t tell whether any of them were still alive, of course, although there hadn’t been any reports so far about mass bombings up around Utah.

  All of a sudden, though, he realized that he didn’t much care. It made very little difference whether he ever saw them again or not, all personal relations had come to seem a bit indecent and irrelevant these past few years. The only one he cared about seeing was his son, he was interested in him. As for the rest of them, relatives, friends, neighbors, they all seemed suddenly to be just as insane as the whole civilization that had brought everybody to this point of mutual extermination. All the people he knew and had cared about (including himself: see his life with Irene) seemed to him now, in retrospect, to be little EMSIACS, little war-makers, little robot brains; the big EMSIAC had just put them all together, pooled their little wars and made a hell of a big war out of them. . . .

  Somewhere way after two in the morning he put down his notebook. He was dizzy, he rubbed his temples and whispered to himself, “No. I don’t want any more. Fuck it. I’m through.”

  What happened right after that was hard to remember. EMSIAC was clattering away imperviously, Helder was snoring hideously. He slipped the notebook under his pillow and went outside, thinking that he needed some air. Then he walked over to the surgery plane—it was a long distance off, they were carefully dispersed—and found there was nobody in it.

  He climbed inside the plane and poked around for a few minutes. Just for something to do he checked to see how many atomic-energy capsules there were—many dozens, enough to run all the motors in the plane for two or three hundred years. He eased into the cockpit and energized the starter, just for the heck of it.

  The next moment, without anything in his mind, he took off. Automatically, since everything that nauseated him lay to the north and west, he turned south and east.

  Not a minute too soon. Talk about the hand of destiny. He looked at his watch and saw that it was 3:29. Then he became aware of EMSIAC clicking away in the communications room. The click was mixed with another, more ominous sound: the hoarse foghorn blast that was the signal for a red-flash emergency. He realized that the blast had been going on for minutes, it just hadn’t registered.

  He set the controls on automatic flight and hurried back to look at the tape. With uncomprehending eyes he stared at the little ribboned announcement of catastrophe:

  Hospital Unit X-234-BL . . . attention . . . red flash alert . . . s
quadron of enemy bombers cruising toward your position approaching north northwest . . . expect attack 3:31 . . . do not try to take off . . . assume defensive positions . . . all anti-aircraft personnel to posts . . . employ red-flash emergency strategy 28-RF-6AA . . .

  Martine dashed back to the cockpit and peered out through the Plexiglas bubble. Sure enough, at about 3:33, great blinding flashes began to shimmy up from the encampment area, then seething white mushrooms of cloud. He couldn’t see the bombers, the smart thing for him was to get the hell out of there even though there was some awful fascination in the scene.

  Minutes later, with a jolt in his belly, he realized something. The mushrooms weren’t receding any more. He had set the auto-flight for southeast and steep climb, the mushrooms should be dropping away and back as he watched. They weren’t any more. They were coming closer, getting bigger. The plane wasn’t climbing away, it had circled and was heading back in toward the camp.

  He jumped. A metallic gutty voice bellowed out at him from the rear of the ship, twanging and hollow: “Surgery plane 17-M, Hospital Unit X-234-BL. You are on unauthorized flight. We are returning you to base. Report to your commanding officer immediately upon landing for court-martial. You are on unauthorized flight. We are returning—”

  It was EMSIAC’S voice, the electrovox voice which was activated only in the most extreme emergencies. The dreaded voice which never came through except to bark instructions involving the most urgent disciplinary procedures.

  Martine understood now. The automatic pilot was not steering the plane. EMSIAC had taken over command of the flight and was whisking the craft back to its base despite the upstart wishes of its occupant. If the plane touched ground again it meant death for Martine. Even if he was lucky enough to survive the bombing attack, he would be shot for his desertion. The articles of war were perfectly clear about unauthorized flights.