her she’d have to climb it. No, she was afraid that if a rusted step broke
off or was wet or icy and she fell, there’d be no one who’d know about
it for hours, except Tootie, and he was no Rex the Wonder Dog who’d
go for help. Tootie’d bark and bark and then quit while she just lay
there and died.
She made coffee on the hot plate and plotted her observations on
the weather map, the part of the job she liked the best. At 0002 she
went out to the shed to launch the balloon. It was cold now and she
pulled on gloves—the helium tanks could be icy to the touch and the
connections could take a long time to get right, especially for a single
observer on a night shift. The empty balloon was slick and sticky like
peeled skin when you took it from the box and you had to get it
unfolded right and connected to the tank, and then you had to inflate
it enough to get it aloft but not so much that it would burst from the
decreasing pressure before it reached the cloud ceiling, which was high
tonight. Muriel had set up the theodolite on its tripod to track it as it
rose. When the limp balloon had started filling and swelling and lifting
itself—there were always jokes about what it reminded you of, you
couldn’t make them around the unmarried girls—Muriel prepared the
little candle in a paper lantern that it would carry upward. During the
day you could just track the balloon itself against the sky until it disap-
peared, but at night you needed that light. Muriel thought: better to
light one candle than to curse the darkness. She thought that once on
every night shift: better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
She got tired of herself, sometimes, alone.
This night she got the balloon off all right, it rose lightly and confi-
dently, there was no wind to snatch it out of her hand (take her hand
too and maybe herself upward with it) and the candle stayed lit, and
Muriel followed it with the scope of the theodolite, racking it upward
steadily, losing the little dot of light and finding it again. Until at last it
came to the cloud layer and dimmed and was gone. It always seemed
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 245
brave to her, that little flickerer, like the light of an old Columbus sail-
ing ship going off into the unknown.
She clamped the theodolite and took the reading down. She was
returning to the station to phone in her report—Little Tom Field was
too little even to have a Teletype, it was just a few acres of prairie out-
lined in lights—when she began to feel something. Later she’d say “hear
something,” but in that first moment it seemed to be something she felt.
Tootie felt it too, and barked at it, whatever or wherever it was.
Muriel was used to some strange weather. She’d been knocked over
by a fireball rolling through the station, and ached for a week; when a
downpour followed hard on a dust storm, she called in a report of
“flying mud balls,” which they didn’t like but which she was just then
seeing smack the windows as though thrown by bad boys. So what was
this coming?
Not weather, no. A sound: now it was certainly a sound, a big sound
aloft, and she could start to think it was likely an aircraft of some kind
though no lights were visible yet. It sometimes happened that lost air-
craft would come in to Little Tom Field, or planes would land that
didn’t like the weather—once even a DC-2, the pilot had wanted to fly
under the cloud cover (he told her), but company rules wouldn’t let him
fly that low. There was a dit-da transmitter in the station that sent out
a signal all the time, just an International Code “A” for identification,
but you could ride in on it if you had to, a little footpath in the sky.
Bigger than a DC-2. The high cloud cover was shredding as she
expected it to and a full moon overhead glowed through. Whatever it
was came closer, the felt sound growing into an awful, awesome noise.
It was coming in way too low for its size and coming in fast. She felt
like running away, but which way? Then there it was, good Christ,
blotting out a huge swath of sky, its running lights out but streams of
flame trailing out behind its wings. She’d never seen anything that big
aloft. It lowered itself toward the field, which was almost smaller than
itself, and it seemed just then to realize how hopeless a hope it was, this
field it had come upon in its troubles, and it leveled off, not rising
though but skimming between the earth and the clouds. It had six
engines she could now see, and three of them were on fire and two of
the other props were revolving in a halting hopeless way and they were
all attached to the wrong side of the wing. It was passing overhead, lit
246 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
by the field’s lights, vast belly passing right over her and causing her,
foolishly, to duck.
What was it, was this prairie under attack from some new Jap or
German war machine we’d brought down? It had gone beyond the
field’s lights, but she could still feel its roar and still see, like the candle
of the weather balloon, the sparkle of the fires coming from those
engines. Out there where it went there were only low hills and woods.
She waited, looking into that darkness, almost knowing what she
would see, and yet seized with a huge shudder when not two minutes
later she saw it, a bloom of flame-light that reflected from the clouds;
then the dull thunder following after. Muriel was already headed for
the shack and the telephone.
At about the same hour by the clock (though two hours later by the
sun) Henry Van Damme was awakened in his bedroom that looked out
to the Pacific over the city. It was his brother, who alone knew this
telephone number. The silken body beside Henry in the wide bed
stirred also at the sound, and Henry got up, bringing the phone with
him on its long cord, and pulled on a dressing gown while he listened.
“I’m securing the site,” Julius said. “The weather observer who saw
it asked if it was an enemy bomber, she’d never seen the like.”
“Crew?” Henry asked.
“Lost. Ship had lost power and they were too low to ditch when the
fires started.”
“Oh dear.”
“It’s the cylinder heads overheating,” Julius said. “The cowl flaps
need to be shortened. Ship was on its way to the coast for the modifica-
tions.”
“Won’t be enough,” Henry said. “My guess.”
Julius said nothing. They both knew the problem: that the B-30 was
being designed, prototyped, tested, debugged, retested, built, and deployed
all at the same time, and by ten or fifteen different companies, suppliers,
builders, their old competitors, the government. How could it not keep
going wrong in little ways, little ways that added up to big ways.
“Get everybody together as soon as we can,” Henry said, though of
course Julius would have already begun doing that.
“We’ll ground the ships that are coming off the line now,” Julius
said. “Till we know what modifications work.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 247
On the bejeweled map of the city outside Henry’s wide plate-glass
windows, lines of light like airstrips, not so bright as before the war,
ran toward the sea, yellow, bluish, white. In the dark room a clock
glowed, and beside its face a little window showed the date, white tiles
that turned every twenty-four hours with a soft clack. The fourteenth
of April 1944. No one would forget it.
“I’ll call the families,” Henry said. “Get me the names.”