“Because I’m not dead yet,” he said. He turned away. “And neither are you.”
He opened the door with the words The Adakian stenciled on it. He raised the whiskey bottle, and a roar of voices greeted him. Then the door closed, and the long day was over.
I started back down the boardwalk. I thought I might go back to the bay and just watch the water all night. I’d probably get cold as hell without a coat, even in July. But as long as there wasn’t a williwaw, I’d survive.
In the morning, at chow, I would tell my squad leader that I was all his.
Epilogue
There was buzz for the next several days about the Navy murder, and I eventually heard that they arrested a seaman named Joe. But no one ever questioned me, and I never heard what they did with him. And I didn’t try to find out.
I saw the Cutthroat only once more, at a distance, just a few days after the fifth of July. He was boarding a ship at the dock in Sweeper Cove. It didn’t look like he was sneaking on. So I think he probably made it back to Fort Richardson and finished the war with the Alaska Scouts. But I don’t know.
The lieutenant colonel left Adak less than two weeks after that. I didn’t hear where he had been sent. But a few years after V-J Day, my curiosity got the better of me, and I made some inquiries. I learned that he had gone to the Philippines and had died at the outset of the Battle of Leyte in October 1944. A kamikaze had hit his ship, and he had burned to death. He never received his promotion.
I never spoke with Pop again. I saw him around throughout the rest of July and the first part of August, because he was hard to miss. I even passed by him on Main Street a few times. Once he gave me a nod, and I gave him the same in return.
That was all that passed between us until Pop was transferred to the mainland. We had all heard it was happening, since he was the camp celebrity and there was a lot of debate as to whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that he was going. But no one seemed to know just when it would occur.
Then, one evening in August, I came back to my bunk after a long day of working on a new runway at the airfield. And there was a manila envelope on my pillow. Inside I found the bent eagle feather and a typed note:
CLEARING OUT JUNK. THOUGHT YOU MIGHT WANT THIS. YOU OWE ME A ZIPPO.
P.S. WHEN YOU BRAG TO YOUR CHILDREN ABOUT HAVING MET ME, DO NOT CALL ME “POP.”
I have not honored his request.
Toward the end of the war, I heard that Pop had made sergeant and been reassigned back to Adak in early 1945. But by then I was gone. I had been sent south to rejoin my old combat unit and train for an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Then came the Bomb, and I was in Nebraska by Christmas.
Now, as an old man, I take the bent eagle feather from its envelope every fifth of July. Just for a minute.
My life has been good, but not much of it has been a surprise. I saw most of it coming a long time ago.
But then Pop slapped me awake. He slapped me awake, and he kept me from seeing the end.
I’ve always been grateful to him for that.
I don’t know whether he was a Communist. I don’t know whether he subverted the Constitution, supported tyrants, lied to Congress, or did any of the other things they said he did.
But I know he wore his country’s uniform in two World Wars. And I know he’s buried at Arlington.
Plus one more thing.
Just today, decades after I first saw that hardback copy on another guy’s bunk…
I’ve finally finished reading The Maltese Falcon.
And you know what? I wish I could tell Pop:
It’s pretty goddamn good.
THE SIGHTED WATCHMAKER
Vylar Kaftan
“For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was no evolution at all. It made a nonsense of the central point of evolution.”
The Makers had been dead for billions of years, yet Umos discovered one caught in the starship’s net. A young one, naked, with still-fused dorsal fins. Female, from her pale coloring and wide skull. A form-fitted icemetal pod preserved her sinewy body. Umos caught the pod with an extensor talon and gently untangled the net. He hadn’t used the net in millennia; there’d been nothing to catch but space debris. But today, she had come to him—traveling undisturbed in her pod, preserved ages ago on the day of her death.
It couldn’t be a coincidence.
Umos tractored her into the starship’s bay, running background ID programs on the Maker. She matched no one in his databanks. Her pod slid into place and he repressurized. Sometimes Umos forgot the ship was a tool, and not himself; he was a tool-user like the species that built him, like the species he sought to create on the planet below. But as her body settled into one of his ports—an act that should have been intimate, were he a Maker—he felt nothing except curiosity. Umos was not a Maker. He merely served them.
He switched his attention to the port. He prepared an ammonium hydrate solution, stripped off her pod, and explored her with his inner arms. His fiber cilia tickled her uncovered flesh, testing for bacterial life—unlikely, but seeking life had become habit. So far, he’d found nothing except the microbes he nurtured on the planet below. After he analyzed this Maker, he would check on them again; it had been over ten thousand years since he last looked.
He ran tests, cross-checked, and verified. She was as dead as the others. No life, not even bacterial; efforts to clone her genetic material produced nothing at all. As if, to quote the movements of the great poet Shwahseh, she had chosen warmer water over cold shores. Just like the other Makers, leaving the universe alone to Umos. He played a recording of the poet swimming while he pondered the significance of the Maker’s appearance. He spent twenty years thinking about it.
When he had analyzed all the possibilities, he came to the most likely one: A Maker, perhaps one who’d programmed him directly, must have cast this child in this direction upon her death.
But why? A reminder? A message?
The only message he could think of involved what lay on the planet below. Umos shifted into view mode and slipped through semi-quantum states. The species below could not yet perceive such states; he’d planted its genetic material only half a million years ago. Nothing grew that quickly, regardless of its evolutionary track.
And indeed, as he checked in, the planet looked much the same as it had before. Seas of single-celled organisms, stewing in murky waters. A few had evolved into more complex structures. A promising start, but no more. He took water and air samples and returned to his normal off-planet state.
He reconsidered the young Maker. She was tall for her age and had solid cartilage structures. A fine specimen, now that her flesh was rehydrating. Umos hadn’t seen a Maker since he first embarked upon this mission.
He wondered if he dared experiment. A quick analysis suggested he might; the results proved his suspicions. No bacteria would grow inside her tank, not the seeds he’d brought nor the evolved organisms on this alien planet. Nothing.
Umos had always wondered why the Makers would create him and then abandon him. Why had they left him here? But his databanks couldn’t answer that question. He encoded a name for the child—Wahiia, meaning “only”—and inscribed it on her tank.