front door, and open a beer or a soda pop. A Thursday night in May,
when the day shift was coming back and people were calling out the
open windows or turning their radios outward that way for the danc-
ing starting up in the still-hot street, Rollo Stallworthy brought out his
long-necked banjo and began the lengthy process of tuning it up, each
sour note stinging like a little pinprick. Rollo, foreman in Shop 128,
did this with great care and solemnity, same as he would finger your
finished control panel wiring or panel seals. Then almost when nobody
was interested at all in looking or listening to the process any longer
he’d start hammering on, a skeletal rattling of notes, and sing out stuff
that nobody’d ever heard of and that only seemed to resemble the corn-
ball music you expected. It was funnier because his expression never
changed behind the round glasses and that brush mustache like Jeff’s
in the funny papers.
“Teenie time-O
In the land of Pharaoh-Pharaoh
Come a rat trap pennywinkle hummadoodle rattlebugger
Sing song kitty wontcha time-ee-o!”
Horace Offen, called “Horse” for as long as anyone knew and for
almost as long as he himself could remember, sat at the rackety kitchen
table in the unit he shared with Rollo, his portable typewriter open
and a piece of yellow copy paper rolled in it. Horse almost never tried
to write in the heat of the frypan bungalow but on the way back from
the plant that day an idea had begun forming in his mind for a new
piece, a new kind of piece in fact, not just another press release about
how many million rivets, how many kids drank how many gallons of
milk in the nursery and how that milk came from the cows that ate the
hay that grew in the fields that went for miles beyond the plant’s perim-
eters—the “house-that-Jack-built” gimmick, a good idea you could use
only once, or once a year anyway—no this was something different,
something beyond all that, something maybe anybody could think up
(and Horse Offen knew that he tended to think up, all on his own, a lot
of good ideas that a lot of other writers had already thought up) but
which wouldn’t be easy to do really right, and was maybe beyond
6 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Horse’s powers—a thought he found at once chest-tightening and elat-
ing, like placing a bet bigger than you can afford to lose. The first lines
he had written on the yellow sheet looked brave and bold and just a
little anxious, the same as he felt:
I am Pax. Pax is my name, and in Latin my name means
Peace. I am not named for the peace that I bring, but for
the peace that I promise.
The hysterical fan on the counter waved back and forth over Horse
as he tapped the sweat-slippery keys of the typewriter. There was
nowhere, nowhere on earth he had been, as hot as this plain. Horse felt
lifeblood, precious ichor, extracted from his innermost being in the
salty drops that tickled his brows and the back of his neck.
In my belly I carry terrible weapons of war, and I will not
stint to use them against the warmakers. But with every
bomb dropped there comes a hope: that when the winds
of war on which I fly are stilled at last, there will never
again be death dropped from the air upon the cities, the
homes, and the hopes of men and women.
An awful pity took hold of Horse Offen, and a chill inhabited him.
What words could do; how rarely they did anything at all when he
employed them!
Belly was wrong. It made the bombs seem like turds. In my body.
Outside, the nightly ruckus was kicking up, Horse could hear a radio
or a gramophone and Rollo’s ridiculous banjo, the most inexpressive
musical instrument Man ever made. People calling from lawn to lawn,
bungalow to bungalow; laughter, noise. The ten thousand men and
women.
These things I know, although truthfully I have not yet
been born. When at last I come forth from the huge han-
gars where ten thousand men and women work to bring
me and the many others like me to birth, I will be the larg-
est and most powerful weapon of the air ever built, the
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 7
latest child of all the thinkers and planners, the daredevil
pilots and the slide-rule engineers who made this nation’s
air industry. Yet I am a new generation. The Wright broth-
ers’ first flight was not longer than my wingspan of TK
feet. When the men and women with their hands and their
machines have given me wings, they will be so broad that
a Flying Fortress will be able to nestle beneath each one,
left and right.
Was that true? He thought it was. It would need some checking.
When he’d first started writing press releases at Van Damme and sub-
mitting copy to the Aero, the editor (little more than a layout man in
fact) had asked him what the hell this TK meant. Horse had worked
briefly for Luce (well he’d been tried out for a couple of months) and he
sighed and smiled patiently. TK means To Come. Information or fact
to come. Why T K then? Because that’s the way it’s done. The way the
big papers do it. Time. Life. Fortune.
The workers who build my growing body come from every
state in this nation, from great cities and little towns. They
come from the Appalachians and the Rockies, the Smok-
ies and the Catskills, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Green
Mountains, the White. They are men and women, Negro
and white, American Indian, Czech, Pole, Italian, Anglo-
Saxon. They are old and young, big and small, smart and
stupid
Inspiration was leaking away, and Horse was where he had been
before, writing what he had written before. But there was a place this
was meant to reach, Horse felt sure, whether he could reach it or not.
That voice speaking. Why did it seem to him female? Just because of
all those ships, those old frigates and galleons? He had almost written
to bring me and my sisters to birth.
They believe that they came here just because the work to
be done is here, because they’ve got sons or husbands at the
front, because they saw the ads in the papers and listened to
8 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
the President’s appeal, because they want this war to be
won, and most of all they want it over. And that is my
promise. But this they do not know: that it is I, Pax, who
have drawn them to me. Here to this place I drew them
before I existed, I drew them to me so that I could come to
be: and as I grew, I reached out to more and more, to every
corner of this nation, calling the ones who would rivet, and
weld, and draft, and wire, and seal, and
With a sudden cry Horse Offen yanked out from the typewriter the
yellow sheet, which parted as he pulled, leaving a tail behind. Oh God
what crap. What was he thinking? Outside the fun was rolling, sum-
moning Horse, offering a Lucky Lager, an It’s-It ice-cream bar. He
closed the lid of the typewriter and locked it shut.
A few units down, Pancho Notzing entertained the Teenie Weenies,
the ones anyway who hadn’t been moved to other shifts in the last
reshuffle of forces, which somewhat broke up that old gang o’ mine.
From an oddity of the settlement’s geometries, certain of the corner
units, like Pancho’s, had a wider spread of ground around them, so