Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time

by Judith Merril (ed. )

  He gasped and sat up, spilling blankets from sleep-hot shoulders. He shivered a moment in darkness, shaking his head in his hands. Bixby snored faintly on the other cot. Engines were coughing to Hie on the flight line as the ground crews pre-flighted the waiting ships. The breath of morning came icy through the tent-flaps to shock him into full wakefulness.

  He glanced at the luminous flare of his watch dial. It was nearly killing time.

  He swung his legs out of bed, felt the gritty earth under his bare feet, groped under the cot for fleece-lined boots. He lit a cigarette, then a candle, stared at Bixby for a moment. Bixby’s mouth was working and a sliver of drool lay over his chin.

  Mark Kessel hauled his lanky frame to its feet, and stepped over to Bixby’s bunk. He lifted one end of the cot two feet from the floor and dropped it hard. Then he went outside to finish dressing in the olive grove while Bixby spluttered and fought the bedclothes.

  Dew was in the olive trees, and it glistened faintly in the dim light from other tents in the grove where men grumbled before the dawn and crawled into coveralls and flight jackets, stuffed candy bars and bail-out kits in their knee pockets, buckled low-slung forty-fives about their waists, tucked a scented letter inside their shirts, and stalked away with a lazy slouch to fly and kill in the dawn.

  “I’ve got a feeling,” came Bixby’s muffled voice from the tent.

  “Yeah?” Mark grunted, not wanting to talk. He dumped frigid water from a jerry can into a steel helmet and began sloshing his face and head.

  “This one’ll be a bitch,” said Bixby.

  “Maybe.”

  “This your forty-sixth, Mark, or -seventh?”

  Mark Kessel glowered for a moment into darkness. “Dry up, will you, Bix? I don’t feel like gab.”

  “Hung over?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Dreams again, huh? About the dame.”

  “Just dry up.”

  “Okay, Skipper. Sorry.”

  A stupid mistake, he decided, telling Bix about the dreams and about La. A drunkenly stupid mistake. Bix made noises like a green flight surgeon with delusions of psychiatry, and, having memorized the symptoms of flight fatigue, was always ready to gig a fellow fly-boy with a diagnosis, prognosis, or post mortem. And he couldn’t understand about La.

  An orderly-room corporal came prowling through the grove, splashing a flashlight’s beam among the trees and bellowing, “All bombardier-navigators, report immediately to briefing. All bombigators, early briefing.”

  A tent flap parted, revealing a slit of light with a head in it. “Hey, Corp!” it called. “What’s the target?”

  “Not sure. Lieutenant. Heard it’s Perugia.”

  Listening, Mark Kessel froze, his face dripping.

  “Hell, we just hit Prujie last week,” growled the head.

  “Zat so?” answered the corporal indifferently. “All bombigators, report immediately to briefing! All bombigators…” The corporal wandered on.

  Mark stood rocking slightly, towel halfway to his face, remembering Perugia. He heard Bix coming outside, and began drying himself.

  “He say Perugia?” Bix grunted.

  “Yeah.”

  “Told you this one’ll be a bitch.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, Pappy, he was yelling at me. See you later.”

  “Yeah. Take it easy.”

  Bix shuffled away toward the orderly room, unzipped boots making cocky flapping sounds about his ankles. Mark sighed and went back into the tent to stretch out on his cot and think. A preliminary bombardier s briefing meant that he had a half-hour or so before pilots and enlisted crews were called. The group had done a lousy job on Perugia last week, and the colonel probably meant to rumble about it to the men who manned the bombsights. It was decreed that the city should die.

  Mark lay blowing slow smoke at the candle flame and wondered what the hell had happened to him in eight months of war. Once he was sick when he saw the long hungry strip of bomb bursts trace a belt of billowing death across a small Italian village. Once he howled in the cockpit when a flitting Focke-Wulf slashed in and down from five o’clock high, leaving the plexiglass turret of his wing ship coated crimson from inside. The turret was partially shattered, and the slip stream dried the crimson to ugly brown and flaked it away before wheels touched home ground.

  Now he felt nothing. I am a machine, he thought. Or a part of a machine. A machine with five human parts geared in with the aluminum, glass, and steel. They screw us into our places and we function like pistons, or cogs, or vacuum tubes. We, who were five, become one, and that beats hell out of the Trinity.

  Listen, Kessel, he told himself, you’re getting to be a sad sack of cemented merde. You got four missions to go and they send you home. Why bitch about it now?

  But he closed his eyes and watched a mental bomb pattern trace a mental stripe of hell across a small mental village, and it all looked quietly familiar and unfrightening to him. He dived down through billowing dust to peer at crushed things lying in the rubble, and still he felt nothing.

  Mark Kessel stubbed out his cigarette in the dirt floor of the tent and asked himself almost indifferently what had happened to his soul? Or whatever it was.

  He stared at the candlelight flickering on the canvas canopy above him and struggled to feel something besides emptiness.

  He thought of La. She brought a faint tickling to his scalp and a pleasant pulsing of the temples. For a long time he lay basking in the warmth of La. She was sleeping. She lay curled in a feather bed, dark hair tangled across an oversized pillow, lips parted, an arm under her head. He scented the faint musky warmth about her, watched her lazy breathing, noted the paleness of a shaven armpit. She stirred in her sleep and smiled faintly. She was dreaming of him. He slipped quietly into her dream, and they wandered along a sunny lake shore, watching the ducks skimming low over water that scintillated in the breeze.

  “Will they read the banns tomorrow?” she whispered.

  “Tomorrow at every Mass.”

  Mark shook his head and sat up. There was paper in his valpack at the end of the cot. He dragged it out and lay on his side to write with the stationery box on the edge of the cot. He usually wrote her a letter before a mission, if there were time enough.

  He told her about his crew, and about Lecce and San Pancrazio and the way the old Italian women came to catch lizards and snails in the vineyard and cooked them over charcoal fires along rubbled streets in the village. He told her about the olive grove and the vineyards and the donkey carts painted in carnival colors, and about how he had tasted a donkey steak in a San Pancrazio café. He told her about the little girl with the festering shrapnel wound, and the bullet-pocked walls of once-fascist buildings whose megalomaniac inscriptions in praise of Italia and Giovannezza had been daubed over with red paint and obscenity.

  And…

  Listen, babe, this one’s got me down. I haven’t talked about such stuff before, but this time’s different, I’m scared as hell. This mission gives me the shakes. Maybe it’s only because I’m nearly finished with my tour. Maybe it’s because I’m about ready to go back. But it’s more like being scared for you, baby, not for myself. I felt like this the last time we hit this target.

  The words surprised him. He had felt no conscious fear, but as words poured forth, he knew that fear was there.

  I love you, La.

  He stared at the letter for a time, then held it toward the candle flame, watched soot collect on its underside, watched a charred spot appear, crack, and catch fire.

  The last ashes were fluttering to the floor when the tent flaps slapped apart and a bulldog face thrust itself inside.

  “Whatthehell, Kessel, you think we oughta hold the goddam war up for you? Get your lazy butt out to the truck!”

  “Sorry, Major. I didn’t hear the call.”

  Major Gladin’s hammy face put on a fanged smirk. “Well you got my personal invitation now, Lieutenant. Shall I send a staff car for you, L
ieutenant, or can you walk?”

  Kessel reddened and rolled off the bunk. Major Gladin stalked away, mumbling about the “fifty-mission heebies” and temperamental goddam airplane jockeys who needed wet nurses.

  He scraped the ashes of the letter into the dirt with his foot. Maybe you’ll know I wrote it anyhow, babe. Maybe you’ll get it somehow, even if I don’t know just where to mail it.

  A brisk dawn wind had risen, and clouds gathered in a gory dawn. A pair of Limey trucks hauled the flight crews of the 489th Squadron from the tent area along the winding bumpy road to the old barracks that served as a briefing room. Narrowed eyes watered in the wind, and men sandwiched their chapped faces between the fleece-skin lapels of their jackets. Men huddled behind the cabs of the trucks, trading occasional insults, or smoking in silence while hair whipped about their eyes and foreheads.

  Mark Kessel listened to the briefing officer with half an ear. Much was routine, and much was of interest chiefly to the squadron leaders and lead bombardiers. Wing men hugged the formation and followed the lead ship. Wing bombardiers toggled off the five hundred pounders upon signal from the goose at the head of the vee. He listened with interest to weather data, flak and fighter reports, and information on the target.

  Perugia was a bulge in an artery that fed the Wehrmacht fist. They wanted the arteries burst and bled. They wanted a tourniquet around Italy, a tourniquet to numb the South and enfeeble it. They wanted an amputation.

  “The marshaling yards are the principal target,” the colonel called curtly, “but stretch the pattern over the town. Give Jerry something to do, shoveling rubble. Any questions?”

  You take five hundred pounds of TNT, thought Kessel, and you dump it on a plain stone house with gypsum floors and charcoal foot warmers and coral Virgins looking down from wall niches, a house with photographs of Babe Ruth and Primo Camera flanking an eighteenth-century crucifix, a house that had seen ten generations of human birth and growth and love and death, a house with antipasto furnishings and oil-and-vinegar atmosphere and girl-at-the-piano warmth about the living room. A house rich with the odor of blood-red wine and moon-pale cheese, with the savor of garlic and anisette, with the aroma of healthy, perspiring women, and on holy days the smell of candle flames, mingled with baking cakes. You bombed it, you clobbered it, you reduced it, you shattered and wrecked and crumbled it into a rubble heap where a bit of cloth caught between the stones fluttered in a dusty breeze. You took the house and kicked it apart into the street so that Jerry would have to spend his time and his bulldozers clearing it out of the way. You never see the house, or the dozens of others like it. You only know it’s there somewhere in the ugly belt of dust and belching hell ten thousand feet beneath you, but not seeing it, you feel only a puzzled concern.

  There were no questions.

  Men in fleece skins and parachute harnesses slouched out of the briefing room and milled toward the squadron trucks. There was no laughter. Quietly, around the corner of the building, a gunner knelt for a chaplain’s blessing, and quickly strode away. Trucks grumbled away, nosed onto a taxi strip, headed for the aircraft dispersal area.

  Mark Kessel stared at the eagles crouched in the olive grove and thought about La. The eagles’ wing racks were loaded with bombs and their bellies were full of thunder. La was combing her hair and smiling softly at her thoughts. She was thinking of a dream. She crossed her legs, and the satin robe fell from her thighs as she sat before the vanity. Brown and slender, and a muscle twitched as she absently swung a foot and laughed softly to herself.

  He caught her shoulders gently, and she came up to him with a low purr of pleasure. Her bosom snuggled close and her shoulders hunched forward against him.

  “O Marco! Che bello questo momento!” she murmured. Mark chuckled at his own inventions. He had not seen an English-speaking woman in so long that even the image of La spoke Italian.

  The dun-colored eagles looked hungry on their concrete emplacements. There is something anxious and eager in the three-legged stance of a B-25, with its blunt and squarish features and the gull-like set of its wings. They’re more alive than most aircraft, he thought, and full of a childlike enthusiasm. They performed their tasks with innocence. There were certain advantages to being a machine, he thought. Certain comforts in mindlessness and guiltlessness. The light of dawn was red on their wings and flaring on their plexiglass blisters.

  “Hell, Kessel!” barked a voice. “Wake up! Shake it, will ya?”

  He came out of a daze, glanced around, saw the rest of his crew already out of the parked truck and walking toward the ship. Bixby grinned back at him over his shoulder.

  “Come on. Pappy! We need a driver.”

  He growled something sour at the men remaining in the truck, vaulted over the tail gate, and sauntered after his crew. The truck lumbered on, delivering parcels of men at each parking station. He checked over the crew chief’s report, signed the slip, listened to the crew chief’s usual straight-faced remark: “Perugia, huh? Milk run again, eh. Pappy?”

  “Sure. Care to come along for the ride?”

  “Guess not. Think I’ll go to town for a little excitement.”

  “Take off.”

  They parted still wearing straight faces.

  The turret gunner and the radio op were already crawling into the rear hatch. Mark turned for a moment to glance over the ship with its “Prince Albert” sign on the nose. It had acquired its name when a North African ground crew had used a tobacco can to patch a bullet hole in the fuselage. The ship was scarred and decrepit, but he knew every inch of it, and he suspected that it would fall to pieces in other hands than the knowing ones of its present ground and flight crews. He loved the old rattling wreck. Almost the way he loved La.

  “Damn it to hell. Pappy!” called Surges, his copilot. “Do we fly today, or don’t we?”

  “Keep your war drawers on, Junior Birdman. Pappy’s comin’.”

  He hiked toward the forward hatch, and moments later inverters whined in the cockpit. Engines coughed to life.

  “Interphone check. Bixby?”

  “Loud and clear. Pappy,” answered the voice in his headsets.

  “Radio?”

  “Burnes, loud and clear.”

  “Turret?”

  “Sparley, ditto, Pappy.”

  “Tail?”

  “Winters, okay, sir.”

  “The class is now in session. Be seated, gentlemen.”

  Preliminary patter brought a sense of oneness somehow, like a man prodding himself to make sure he was still in one piece. Mark lost his black mood as he taxied the Prince from the revetment and into line on the strip. There was thunder of engines in the morning, and the trees whipped in the prop wash at every turning. The eagles lumbered single file to the end of the runway. The eagles took off in pairs, wheels folding gracefully, almost daintily, as they roared aloft and circled for assembly in the sky. Twenty-seven ships gleamed golden in the early sun. A flying wolf pack that rallied by twos and formed in flights of three, three flights in echelon, three squadrons in a staggered vee.

  The wolf pack turned east toward the open sea, and the Adriatic fluttered with blinding gold in the direction of a blazing sun.

  Mark Kessel felt Surges watching him occasionally, gave him a questioning glance. Surges was a dark little man with a sour smirk and a quick nervousness that made Mark wonder sometimes why they’d packed him in a twenty-five instead of a Mustang or a Thunderbolt.

  “Feeling better, Pappy?” Surges asked over the interphone.

  “Better than what?” grunted the pilot.

  “Don’t hand me that horse manure, Skipper. I can read you like a tech order.”

  “Then read and shut up. There’s a war on, you know.”

  “And if I may echo the immortal words of Sherman, war is a crock of crap.”

  The formation thundered northwestward along the broad blue tongue of the Adriatic. Kessel’s crew fell silent, each of them aware of the other’s presence and functions
, each filling his place in the total Mechanthrope. War, thought Mark, was paradoxical proof that men by nature are cooperative social beings, functioning best as teams. Unfortunately, teams were not necessarily co-operative with other teams.

  Hearken to the wisdom of a washed-out flak dodger, he mused sourly. Once, when he was a sophomore math and philosophy student, he could tolerate his own solemn intellectualizings. Now, when they happened accidentally, he felt the need to boil himself in sarcasm and forget it. Nothing seemed sillier than searching for subtle meanings when the only meaning left in life was how to stay alive. He needed no rationalizations about his reasons for being where he was and what he was. Idealism was for the crumbs who never got there. He liked to fly, and he liked to play the game, and if the rules were dirty, then it would be more embarrassing to refuse to fight than it was to play the rotten game. People were proud of him for playing it, and he was glad they were proud, for no reason other than that it felt good.

  He grinned acidly at Surges. “Hey, Surgie. I just realized that we are the ‘Mothers’-Sons-Who-Fought-and-Bled’ that they talk about on the Fourth.”

  “Jeez, whattay know!” Surges mused for a moment. “Say, you thinking about doing another tour?”

  Mark spat an obscenity.

  “I know,” said Surges. “You’re feeling guilty about not bleeding.”

  “True, possibly true.”

  “A small scar would probably help.”

  “Help what?”

  “Life, liberty and the pursuit of women. You could always show her your scar as a way of breaking the ice.”

  “Not necessary. No ice…”

  Around La, he finished under his breath, and fell silent again. Gloomily silent. Maybe I’m really getting psycho, he considered, realizing how much he believed in La. How could he explain about La to somebody like Bixby or Surges? There was this dame, see, and her name was Ruth, and she came from Seattle, and she was blonde, pale-eyed and creamy, see? And she’s waiting for me, hut it’s no damn good any more, because I can’t see her. I see only La, and La is a ghost, a figment, a myth made by a haunted spirit.