“Are you all right, young man?” Jorn asked.
Numbly Plavitz turned to him and pointed without looking at the ruined world hovering behind him. Like some eidolon indicating the route that all would one day follow. “It’s Europe,” he said. His tone a strange flat calm. “We didn’t go anywhere.”
TWENTY
Back in their reconfigurable barracks that evening the crew brought Farley up to speed about their day’s Good Deeds—what they’d observed, what they’d learned, what they’d contributed. They listened to each other’s accounts like citizens of some ancient country silent before returned travelers’ stories of foreign peoples, strange customs, unlikely beasts, miraculous achievements.
Then Plavitz told them they were still in Europe.
Most of the crew scoffed outright. “I think we’d have heard about a crater the size of New Jersey in the middle of France, don’t you?” said Broben.
Plavitz folded his arms and dug in. “My job is reading maps,” he said. “What I saw was a map of Europe that was mostly hole where the N in Germany ought to be.”
“Nobody on earth could take a picture from outer space,” Broben insisted.
Boney cleared his throat. He was looking at the unlit pipe in his hand. “Nobody on earth in 1943 could,” he said.
“Oh, come on,” Garrett said after the silence became uncomfortable. “You saw what it’s like out there. It’s not Earth, it’s a whole different planet.”
“They speak English,” Boney pointed out. “They grow peanuts.”
They were still mulling it over when someone knocked on the door. It opened and Wennda came in, smiling like someone with a secret she couldn’t wait to tell. “I brought you all a visitor,” she said, and stepped aside to let somebody enter the room.
The room went graveyard quiet. A few men slowly stood.
Francis Owens, tail gunner on the bomber Fata Morgana, stood looking back at them. Uniform repaired and cleaned. Boots polished parade-dress bright. A white gauze dressing covered his left eye. He wore no other bandages or dressings. Not so much as a Band-Aid. No scars, scabs, scrapes, or scratches. Not even a bruise. Cornsilk stubble where his scalp had been flayed to bone above his ruined eye.
The crewmen stared at him in uncharacteristic silence. As if some certain ghost had come calling, pale and tall and blond among them like some revenant messenger. Their quick glances among themselves said more than mere words could. Even Farley hesitated. Francis had been flayed, more torn up by shrapnel than any man he’d ever seen who’d still been alive. And now here he was, three days later, all walking talking googly grin and skinny height of Francis Eugene Owens, white gauze neatly taped across one eye and not another mark on him. That wasn’t a medical miracle, it was goddamn witchcraft. Surely even Lazarus’ wife had pulled up short for a few seconds before giving him a hug and a welcome back, honey.
Finally Shorty stepped close to Francis and squinted at him like a man holding a counterfeit bill up to the light. He poked the coltish tail gunner in the shoulder as if testing his solidity. Then he put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “Well, hell,” he said. “If they can fix you up this good, how come you’re still so damn ugly?”
Francis flushed. “Aw, gee whiz,” he said. “Lay off, will ya?”
The crew roared.
“I woke up,” Francis told the crew, “and I was floating in a fish tank full of Jell-O! I was breathing it. Like a fish! Can you imagine? The doc had to come and calm me down. A black lady doctor, cap!”
“She did a fine job on you, Francis,” Farley said. “You look good as new.” He hesitated. “It’s a tough break about the eye, but I’d say you’re really pretty lucky.”
Francis grinned and ducked his head. “Aw, heck, it’s not so bad,” he said. “The doc said the light’ll bother me for a couple days after the patch comes off, but then it ought to be just fine.”
“That’s terrific,” Farley replied, “I’m glad it won’t—” He stopped. “She said the light will bother it?” he asked.
Francis nodded eagerly. “She told me it’ll tear up something awful, but that just means it’s healing.”
“Healing.” Farley stared at the patch. They all stared at the patch. Because what was beneath it five days ago had not been an eye. It had been a stringy, bloody mess clinging to Francis’ flayed cheek like the tentacles of a jellyfish.
Farley tipped his cap back and scratched his head. “Doc say when the dressing can come off?” he asked casually.
“Oh, not till tomorrow, at least.”
“Tomorrow.” Farley looked at Wennda.
She shrugged. “I said we’d take care of him,” she said.
Farley lay awake. The man who could sleep like a baby the night before a mission now found himself staring up toward the barely discernible ceiling while his mind hummed and sparked like an overdriven dynamo. Around him in the dimlit room his crew slept on their ingeniously designed bunks, a few of them fitful, a few snoring, most of them out like lights.
The day’s events had gone well and the crew seemed confident that they could be helpful here, if not indispensable. Their stories were tiles in a mosaic that was forming a picture of who these people were, how they lived, how they’d stayed alive so long. All of it useful. All of it paling beside Boney’s knockout reply to Broben.
“Nobody on earth could take a picture from outer space.”
“Nobody on earth in 1943 could.”
Farley realized that Francis’ arrival had derailed any further discussion of the idea that they had somehow landed in the future. He also understood that this was how the crew had wanted it. The future, another planet, the sky over Germany, it didn’t make a difference. What mattered was getting out. Getting back alive.
But the notion ate at Farley. Germany was just another country. Even a different planet was just another place. You could at least imagine getting back. But as far as Farley knew the only direction you could travel in time was forward, at a steady speed of sixty minutes an hour. The future was a one-way trip. An inevitable destination. But the past didn’t even exist anymore. It wasn’t another country, another planet. It simply wasn’t. There was no more there there.
Farley felt a blind panic lurking, like some stalking beast outside a cabin probing for an opening, a weakness. Any way in.
He fought it down and frowned up at the darkness. Who knew how late it was? Three a.m.? Four? Would there even be dawn light in this alien and yet familiar place? Certainly there would be no growing birdsong, no morning dew, no rising breeze.
Wennda, he suddenly remembered, had asked him out.
As the crew had been passing Francis around like some kind of party novelty, scrutinizing his patch and his baby-pink skin, practically sniffing him like doubtful apes, Wennda had pulled Farley aside and asked, “Would you like to go somewhere together tomorrow? Before your meeting with my father?”
“Sure,” Farley had replied, distracted by Francis, by the bombshell Boney had dropped into the discussion about still being in Europe. “Where’d you have in mind?”
“Well, there’s no out to go to around here,” she’d said, “but I can come pretty close.”
Farley had absently agreed, not registering Wennda’s faint disappointment, and they’d set an early date, and only now did Farley remember previously telling Wennda, When you take someone out, you go somewhere together. So you can get to know each other better.