THE LUCKY STRIKE
                                         Kim Stanley Robinson

    Stories of alternative worlds tend to be very colorful, sometimes even bizarre, as sf writers imagine how
different our world might have been if the Romans had colonized North America or if the dinosaurs hadn't
become extinct. The alternative world in this thoughtful novelette presents a much more contemporary
change in history… a change we see in the making. The result is just as important, though.

   Kim Stanley Robinson's first novel, The Wild Shore, was nominated for the Nebula Award earlier this
year. His second novel is Icehenge.

   War breeds strange pastimes. In July of 1945 on Tinian Island in the North Pacific,
Captain Frank January had taken to piling pebble cairns on the crown of Mount Lasso-
one pebble for each B-29 takeoff, one cairn for each mission. The largest cairn had
four hundred stones in it. It was a mindless pastime, but so was poker. The men of the
509th had played a million hands of poker, sitting in the shade of a palm around an
upturned crate sweating in their skivvies, swearing and betting all their pay and
cigarettes, playing hand after hand after hand, until the cards got so soft and dog-eared
you could have used them for toilet paper. Captain January had gotten sick of it, and
after he lit out for the hilltop a few times some of his crewmates started trailing him.
When their pilot Jim Fitch joined them it became an official pastime, like throwing
flares into the compound or going hunting for stray Japs. What Captain January
thought of the development he didn't say. The others grouped near Captain Fitch, who
passed around his battered flask. "Hey January," Fitch called. "Come have a shot."

  January wandered over and took the flask. Fitch laughed at his pebble. "Practising
your bombing up here, eh Professor?"

   "Yah," January said sullenly. Anyone who read more than the funnies was
Professor to Fitch. Thirstily January knocked back some rum. He could drink it any
way he pleased up here, out from under the eye of the group psychiatrist. He passed
the flask on to Lieutenant Matthews, their navigator.

   "That's why he's the best," Matthews joked. "Always practising."

   Fitch laughed. "He's best because I make him be best, right Professor?"

   January' frowned. Fitch was a bulky youth, thick-featured, pig-eyed-a thug, in
January's opinion. The rest of the crew were all in their mid-twenties like Fitch, and
they liked the captain's bossy roughhouse style. January, who was thirty-seven, didn't
go for it. He wandered away, back to the cairn he had been building. From Mount
Lasso they had an overview of the whole island, from the harbor at Wall Street to the
north field in Harlem. January had observed hundreds of B-29s roar off the four
parallel runways of the north field and head for Japan. The last quartet of this
particular mission buzzed across the width of the island, and January dropped four
more pebbles, aiming for crevices in the pile. One of them stuck nicely.

   "There they are!" said Matthews. "They're on the taxiing strip."

   January located the 5O9th's first plane. Today, the first of August, there was
something more interesting to watch than the usual Superfortress parade. Word was
out that General Le May wanted to take the 509th's mission away from it. Their
commander Colonel Tibbets had gone and bitched to Le May in person, and the
general had agreed the mission was theirs, but on one condition: one of the general's
men was to make a test flight with the 509th, to make sure they were fit for combat
over Japan. The general's man had arrived, and now he was down there in the strike
plane, with Tibbets and the whole first team. January sidled back to his mates to view
the takeoff with them.

   "Why don't the strike plane have a name, though?" Haddock was saying.

   Fitch said, "Lewis won't give it a name because it's not his plane, and he knows it."
The others laughed. Lewis and his crew were naturally unpopular, being Tibbets'
favorites.

   "What do you think he'll do to the general's man?" Matthews asked.

   The others laughed at the very idea. "He'll kill an engine at takeoff, I bet you
anything," Fitch said. He pointed at the wrecked B-29s that marked the end of every
runway, planes whose engines had given out on takeoff. "He'll want to show that he
wouldn't go down if it happened to him."

   "Course he wouldn't!" Matthews said.

   "You hope," January said under his breath.
   "They let those Wright engines out too soon," Haddock said seriously. "They keep
busting under the takeoff load."

    "Won't matter to the old bull," Matthews said. Then they all started in about
Tibbets' flying ability, even Fitch. They all thought Tibbets was the greatest. January,
on the other hand, liked Tibbets even less than he liked Fitch. That had started right
after he was assigned to the 5O9th. He had been told he was part of the most important
group in the war, and then given a leave. In Vicksburg a couple of fliers just back from
England had bought him a lot of whiskies, and since January had spent several months
stationed near London they had talked for a good long time and gotten pretty drunk.
The two were really curious about what January was up to now, but he had stayed
vague on it and kept returning the talk to the blitz. He had been seeing an English
nurse, for instance, whose flat had been bombed, family and neighbors killed… But
they had really wanted to know. So he had told them he was onto something special,
and they had flipped out their badges and told him they were Army Intelligence, and
that if he ever broke security like that again he'd be transferred to Alaska. It was a
dirty trick. January had gone back to Wendover and told Tibbets so to his face, and
Tibbets had turned red and threatened him some more. January despised him for that.
The upshot was that January was effectively out of the war, because Tibbets really
played his favorites. January wasn't sure he really minded, but during their year's
training he had bombed better than ever, as a way of showing the old bull he was
wrong to write January off. Every time their eyes had met it was clear what was going
on. But Tibbets never backed off no matter how precise January's bombing got. Just
thinking about it was enough to cause January to line up a pebble over an ant and drop
it.

  "Will you cut that out?" Fitch complained. "I swear you must hang from the ceiling
when you take a shit so you can practice aiming for the toilet." The men laughed.

   "Don't I bunk over you?" January asked. Then he pointed. "They're going."

   Tibbets' plane had taxied to runway Baker. Fitch passed the flask around again. The
tropical sun beat on them and the ocean surrounding the island blazed white. January
put up a sweaty hand to aid the bill of his baseball cap.

   The four props cut in hard, and the sleek Superfortress quickly trundled up to speed
and roared down Baker. Three-quarters of the way down the strip the outside right
prop feathered.

   "Yow!" Fitch crowed. "I told you he'd do it!"

   The plane nosed off the ground and slewed right, then pulled back on course to
cheers from the four young men around January. January pointed again. "He's cut
number three, too."

   The inside right prop feathered, and now the plane was pulled up by the left wing
only, while the two right props windmilled uselessly. "Holy smoke!" Haddock cried.
"Ain't the old bull something?"

   They whooped to see the plane's power, and Tibbets' nervy arrogance.

   "By God Le May's man will remember this flight," Fitch hooted. "Why, look at
that! He's banking!"

   Apparently taking off on two engines wasn't enough for Tibbets; he banked the
plane right until it was standing on its dead wing, and it curved back toward Tinian.

   Then the inside left engine feathered.

    War tears at the imagination. For three years Frank January had kept his
imagination trapped, refusing to give it any play whatsoever. The dangers threatening
him, the effects of the bombs, the fate of the other participants in the war, he had
refused to think about any of it. But the war tore at his control. That English nurse's
flat. The missions over the Ruhr. The bomber just below him blown apart by flak. And
then there had been a year in Utah, and the viselike grip that he had once kept on his
imagination had slipped away.

   So when he saw the number two prop feather, his heart gave a little jump against
his sternum and helpless he was up there with Ferebee, the first team bombardier. He
would be looking over the pilots' shoulder…

   "Only one engine?" Fitch said.
   "That one's for real," January said harshly. Despite himself he saw the panic in the
cockpit, the frantic rush to power the two right engines. The plane was dropping fast
and Tibbets leveled it off, leaving them on a course back toward the island. The two
right props spun, blurred to a shimmer. January held his breath. They needed more lift;
Tibbets was trying to pull it over the island. Maybe he was trying for the short runway
on the south half of the island.

   But Tinian was too tall, the plane too heavy. It roared right into the jungle above
the beach, where 42nd Street met their East River. It exploded in a bloom of fire. By
the time the sound of the explosion struck them they knew no one in the plane had
survived.

   Black smoke towered into white sky. In the shocked silence on Mount Lasso
insects buzzed and creaked. The air left January's lungs with a gulp. He had been with
Ferebee there at the end, he had heard the desperate shouts, seen the last green rush,
been stunned by the dentist-drill-all-over pain of the impact.

   "Oh my God," Fitch was saying. "Oh my God." Matthews was sitting. January
picked up the flask, tossed it at Fitch.

   "C-come on," he stuttered. He hadn't stuttered since he was sixteen. He led the
others in a rush down the hill. When they got to Broadway a jeep careened toward
them and skidded to a halt. It was Colonel Scholes, the old bull's exec. "What
happened?"

   Fitch told him.

    "Those damned Wrights," Scholes said as the men piled in. This time one had
failed at just the wrong moment; some welder stateside had kept flame to metal a
second less than usual-or something equally minor, equally trivial-and that had made
all the difference.

   They left the jeep at 42nd and Broadway and hiked east over a narrow track to the
shore. A fairly large circle of trees was burning. The fire trucks were already there.

   Scholes stood beside January, his expression bleak. "That was the whole first
team," he said.
   "I know," said January. He was still in shock, in imagination crushed, incinerated,
destroyed. Once as a kid he had tied sheets to his arms and waist, jumped off the roof
and landed right on his chest; this felt like that had. He had no way of knowing what
would come of this crash, but he had a suspicion that he had indeed smacked into
something hard.

   Scholes shook his head. A half hour had passed, the fire was nearly out. January's
four mates were over chattering with the Seabees. "He was going to name the plane
after his mother,"' Scholes said to the ground. "He told me that just this morning. He
was going to call it Enola Gay."

   At night the jungle breathed, and its hot wet breath washed over the 5O9th's
compound. January stood in the doorway of his Quonset barracks hoping for a real
breeze. No poker tonight. Voices were hushed, faces solemn. Some of the men had
helped box up the dead crew's gear. Now most laid on their bunks. January gave up on
the breeze, climbed onto his top bunk to stare at the ceiling.

   He observed the corrugated arch over him. Cricketsong sawed through his
thoughts. Below him a rapid conversation was being carried on in guilty undertones,
Fitch at its center. "January is the best bombardier left," he said. "And I'm as good as
Lewis was."

   "But so is Sweeney," Matthews said. "And he's in with Scholes."

   They were figuring out who would take over the strike. January scowled. Tibbets
and the rest were less than twelve hours dead, and they were squabbling over who
would replace them.

   January grabbed a shirt, rolled off his bunk, put the shirt on.

   "Hey Professor," Fitch said. "Where you going?"

   "Out."

   Though midnight was near it was still sweltering. Crickets shut up as he walked by,
started again behind him. He lit a cigarette. In the dark the MPs patrolling their
fenced-in compound were like pairs of walking armbands. The 509th, prisoners in
their own army. Fliers from other groups had taken to throwing rocks over the fence.
Forcefully January expelled smoke, as if he could expel his disgust with it. They were
only kids, he told himself. Their minds had been shaped in the war, by the war, and for
the war. They knew you couldn't mourn the dead for long; carry around a load like
that and your own engines might fail. That was all right with January. It was an
attitude that Tibbets had helped to form, so it was what he deserved. Tibbets would
want to be forgotten in favor of the mission, all he had lived for was to drop the
gimmick on the Japs, he was oblivious to anything else, men, wife, family, anything.

    So it wasn't the lack of feeling in his mates that bothered January. And it was
natural of them to want to fly the strike they had been training a year for. Natural, that
is, if you were a kid with a mind shaped by fanatics like Tibbets, shaped to take orders
and never imagine consequences. But January was not a kid, and he wasn't going to let
men like Tibbets do a thing to his mind. And the gimmick… the gimmick was not
natural. A chemical bomb of some sort, he guessed. Against the Geneva Convention.
He stubbed his cigarette against the sole of his sneaker, tossed the butt over the fence.
The tropical night breathed over him. He had a headache.

   For months now he had been sure he would never fly a strike. The dislike Tibbets
and he had exchanged in their looks (January was acutely aware of looks) had been
real and strong. Tibbets had understood that January's record of pinpoint accuracy in
the runs over the Salton Sea had been a way of showing contempt, a way of saying
you can't get rid of me even though you hate me and I hate you. The record had forced
Tibbets to keep January on one of the four second-string teams, but with the fuss they
were making over the gimmick January had figured that would be far enough down
the ladder to keep him out of things.

   Now he wasn't so sure. Tibbets was dead. He lit another cigarette, found his hand
shaking. The Camel tasted bitter. He threw it over the fence at a receding armband,
and regretted it instantly. A waste. He went back inside.

   Before climbing onto his bunk he got a paperback out of his footlocker. "Hey
Professor, what you reading now?" Fitch said, grinning.

   January showed him the blue cover. Winter's Tale, by an Isak Dinesen. Fitch
examined the little wartime edition. "Pretty racy, eh?"
   "You bet," January said heavily. "This guy puts sex on every page." He climbed
onto his bunk, opened the book. The stories were strange, hard to follow. The voices
below bothered him. He concentrated harder.

   As a boy on the farm in Arkansas, January had read everything he could lay his
hands on. On Saturday afternoons he would race his father down the muddy lane to
the mailbox (his father was a reader too), grab the Saturday Evening Post and run off
to devour every word of it. That meant he had another week with nothing new to read,
but he couldn't help it. His favorites were the Homblower stories, but anything would
do. It was a way off the farm, a way into the world.

   He had become a man who could slip between the covers of a book whenever he
chose. But not on this night.

   The next day the chaplain gave a memorial service, and on the morning after that
Colonel Scholes looked in the door of their hut right after mess. "Briefing at eleven,"
he announced. His face was haggard. "Be there early." He looked at Fitch with
bloodshot eyes, crooked a finger. "Fitch, January, Matthews-come with me."

  January put on his shoes. The rest of the men sat on their bunks and watched them
wordlessly. January followed Fitch and Matthews out of the hut.

    "I've spent most of the night on the radio with General Le May," Scholes said. He
looked them each in the eye. "We've decided you're to be the first crew to make a
strike."

   Fitch was nodding, as if he had expected it.

   "Think you can do it?" Scholes said.

   "Of course," Fitch replied. Watching him January understood why they had chosen
him to replace Tibbets: Fitch was like the old bull, he had that same ruthlessness. The
young bull.

   "Yes, sir," Matthews said.
   Scholes was looking at him. "Sure," January said, not wanting to think about it.
"Sure." His heart was pounding directly on his sternum. But Fitch and Matthews
looked serious as owls, so he wasn't going to stick out by looking odd. It was big
news, after all; anyone would be taken aback by it. Nevertheless, January made an
effort to nod.

   "Okay," Scholes said. "McDonald will be flying with you as co-pilot." Fitch
frowned. "I've got to go tell those British officers that Le May doesn't want them on
the strike with you. See you at the briefing."

   "Yes, sir."

   As soon as Scholes was around the corner Fitch swung a fist at the sky. "Yow!"
Matthews cried. He and Fitch shook hands. "We did it!" Matthews took January's hand
and wrung it, his face plastered with a goofy grin. "We did it!"

   "Somebody did it, anyway," January said.

   "Ah, Frank," Matthews said. "Show some spunk. You're always so cool."

   "Old Professor Stoneface," Fitch said, glancing at January with a trace of amused
contempt. "Come on, let's get to the briefing."

    The briefing hut, one of the longer Quonsets, was completely surrounded by MPs
holding carbines. "Gosh," Matthews said, subdued by the sight. Inside it was already
smoky. The walls were covered by the usual maps of Japan. Two blackboards at the
front were draped with sheets. Captain Shepard, the naval officer who worked with the
scientists on the gimmick, was in back with his assistant Lieutenant Stone, winding a
reel of film onto a projector. Dr. Nelson, the group psychiatrist, was already seated on
a front bench near the wall. Tibbets had recently sicced the psychiatrist on the group-
another one of his great ideas, like the spies in the bar. The man's questions had struck
January as stupid. He hadn't even been able to figure out that Easterly was a flake,
something that was clear to anybody who flew with him, or even played him in a
single round of poker. January slid onto a bench beside his mates.

   The two Brits entered, looking furious in their stiff-upper-lip way. They sat on the
bench behind January. Sweeney's and Easterly's crews filed in, followed by the other
men, and soon the room was full. Fitch and the rest pulled out Lucky Strikes and lit
up; since they had named the plane only January had stuck with Camels.

  Scholes came in with several men January didn't recognize, and went to the front.
The chatter died, and all the smoke plumes ribboned steadily into the air.

   Scholes nodded, and two intelligence officers took the sheets off the blackboards,
revealing aerial reconnaissance photos.

   "Men," Scholes said, "These are the target cities."

   Someone cleared his throat.

   "In order of priority they are Hiroshima, Kokura, and Nagasaki. There will be three
weather scouts: Straight Flush to Hiroshima, Strange Cargo to Kokura, and Full House
to Nagasaki. The Great Artiste and Number 91 will be accompanying the mission to
take photos. And Lucky Strike will fly the bomb."

    There were rustles, coughs. Men turned to look at January and his mates, and they
all sat up straight. Sweeney stretched back to shake Fitch's hand, and there were some
quick laughs. Fitch grinned.

   "Now listen up," Scholes went on. "The weapon we are going to deliver was
successfully tested stateside a couple weeks ago. And now we've got orders to drop it
on the enemy." He paused to let that sink in. "I'll let Captain Shepard tell you more."

   Shepard walked to the blackboard slowly, savoring his entrance. His forehead was
shiny with sweat, and January realized he was excited or nervous. He wondered what
the shrink would make of that.

   "I'm going to come right to the point," Shepard said. "The bomb you are going to
drop is something new in history. We think it will knock out everything within four
miles."

   Now the room was completely still. January noticed that he could see a great deal
of his nose, eyebrows, and cheeks; it was as if he were receding back into his body,
like a fox into its hole. He kept his gaze rigidly on Shepard, steadfastly ignoring the
feeling. Shepard pulled a sheet back over a blackboard while someone else turned
down the lights.

   "This is a film of the only test we have made," Shepard said. The film started,
caught, started again. A wavery cone of bright cigarette smoke speared the length of
the room, and on the sheet sprang a dead gray landscape: a lot of sky, a smooth desert
floor, hills in the distance. The projector went click-click-click-click, click-click-click-
click. "The bomb is on the top of the tower," Shepard said, and January focused on the
pinlike object sticking out of the desert floor, off against the hills. It was between eight
and ten miles from the camera, he judged; he had gotten good at calculating distances.
He was still distracted by his face.

   Click-click-click-click, click-then the screen went white for a second, filling even
their room with light. When the picture returned the desert floor was filled with a
white bloom of fire. The fireball coalesced and then quite suddenly it leaped off the
earth all the way into the stratosphere, by God, like a tracer bullet leaving a machine-
gun, trailing a whitish pillar of smoke behind it. The pillar gushed up and a growing
ball of smoke billowed outward, capping the pillar. January calculated the size of the
cloud, but he was sure he got it wrong. There it stood. The picture flickered, and then
the screen went white again, as if the camera had melted or that part of the world had
come apart. But the flapping from the projector told them it was the end of the film.

   January felt the air suck in and out of his open mouth. The lights came on in the
smoky room and for a second he panicked, he struggled to shove his features into an
accepted pattern, the shrink would be looking around at them all-and then he glanced
around and realized he needn't have worried, that he wasn't alone. Faces were
bloodless, eyes were blinky or bug-eyed with shock, mouths hung open or were
clamped whitely shut. For a few moments they all had to acknowledge what they were
doing. January, scaring himself, felt an urge to say, "Play it again, will you?" Fitch
was pulling his curled black hair off his thug's forehead uneasily. Beyond him January
saw that one of the Limeys had already reconsidered how mad he was about missing
the flight. Now he looked sick. Someone let out a long whew, another whistled.
January looked to the front again, where the shrink watched them, undisturbed.

   Shepard said, "It's big, all right. And no one knows what will happen when it's
dropped from the air. But the mushroom cloud you saw will go to at least thirty
thousand feet, probably sixty. And the flash you saw at the beginning was hotter than
the sun."

   Hotter than the sun. More licked lips, hard swallows, readjusted baseball caps. One
of the intelligence officers passed out tinted goggles like welder's glasses. January
took his and twiddled the opacity dial.

   Scholes said, "You're the hottest thing in the armed forces, now. So no talking,
even among yourselves." He took a deep breath. "Let's do it the way Colonel Tibbets
would have wanted us to. He picked every one of you because you were the best, and
now's the time to show he was right. So-so let's make the old man proud."

   The briefing was over. Men filed out into the sudden sunlight. Into the heat and
glare. Captain Shepard approached Fitch. "Stone and I will be flying with you to take
care of the bomb," he said.

   Fitch nodded. "Do you know how many strikes we'll fly?"

   "As many as it takes to make them quit." Shepard stared hard at all of them. "But it
will only take one."

   War breeds strange dreams. That night January writhed over his sheets in the hot
wet vegetable darkness, in that frightening half-sleep when you sometimes know you
are dreaming but can do nothing about it, and he dreamed he was walking…

   … walking through the streets when suddenly the sun swoops down, the sun
touches down and everything is instantly darkness and smoke and silence, a deaf
roaring. Walls of fire. His head hurts and in the middle of his vision is a bluewhite blur
as if God's camera went off in his face. Ah-the sun fell, hv thinks. His arm is burned.
Blinking is painful. People stumbling by, mouths open, horribly burned-

   He is a priest, he can feel the clerical collar, and the wounded ask him for help. He
points to his ears, tries to touch them but can't. Pall of black smoke over everything,
the city has fallen into the streets. Ah, it's the end of the world. In a park he finds
shade and cleared ground. People crouch under bushes like frightened animals. Where
the park meets the river red and black figures crowd into steaming water. A figure
gestures from a copse of bamboo. He enters it, finds five or six faceless soldiers
huddling. Their eyes have melted, their mouths are holes. Deafness spares him their
words. The sighted soldier mimes drinking. The soldiers are thirsty. He nods and goes
to the river in search of a container. Bodies float downstream.

   Hours pass as he hunts fruitlessly for a bucket. He pulls people from the rubble. He
hears a bird screeching and he realizes that his deafness is the roar of the city burning,
a roar like the blood in his ears but he is not deaf he only thought he was deaf because
there are no human cries. The people are suffering in silence. Through the dusky night
he stumbles back to the river, pain crashing through his head. In a field men are
pulling potatoes out of the ground that have been baked well enough to eat. He shares
one with them. At the river everyone is dead-

    -and he struggled out of the nightmare drenched in rank sweat, the taste of dirt in
his mouth, his stomach knotted with horror. He sat up and the wet rough sheet clung to
his skin. His heart felt crushed between lungs desperate for air. The flowery rotting
jungle smell filled him and images from the dream flashed before him so vividly that
in the dim hut he saw nothing else. He grabbed his cigarettes and jumped off the bunk,
hurried out into the compound. Trembling he lit up, started pacing around. For a
moment he worried that the idiot psychiatrist might see him, but then he dismissed the
idea. Nelson would be asleep. They were all asleep. He shook his head, looked down
at his right arm and almost dropped his cigarette--but it was just his stove scar, an old
scar, he'd had it most of his life, since the day he'd pulled the frypan off the stove and
onto his arm, burning it with oil. He could still remember the round O of fear that his
mother's mouth had made as she rushed into see what was wrong. Just an old burn
scar, he thought, let's not go overboard here. He pulled his sleeve down.

   For the rest of the night he tried to walk it off, cigarette after cigarette. The dome of
the sky lightened until all the compound and the jungle beyond it was visible. He was
forced by the light of day to walk back into his hut and lie down as if nothing had
happened.

   Two days later Scholes ordered them to take one of Le May's men over Rota for a
test run. This new lieutenant colonel ordered Fitch not to play with the engines on
takeoff. They flew a perfect run, January put the dummy gimmick right on the aiming
point just as he had so often in the Salton Sea; and Fitch powered the plane down into
the violent bank that started their 150-degree turn and flight for safety. Back on Tinian
the lieutenant colonel congratulated them and shook each of their hands. January
smiled with the rest, palms cool, heart steady. It was as if his body were a shell,
something he could manipulate from without, like a bombsight. He ate well, he
chatted as much as he ever had, and when the psychiatrist ran him to earth for some
questions he was friendly and seemed open.

   "Hello, doc."

   "How do you feel about all this, Frank?"

   "Just like I always have, sir. Fine."

   "Eating well?"

   "Better than ever."

   "Sleeping well?"

   "As well as I can in this humidity. I got used to Utah, I'm afraid." Dr. Nelson
laughed. Actually January had hardly slept since his dream. He was afraid of sleep.
Couldn't the man see that?

    ' 'And how do you feel about being part of the crew chosen to make the first
strike?"

   "Well, it was the right choice, I reckon. We're the b-the best crew left."

   "Do you feel sorry about Tibbets' crew's accident?"

   "Yes sir, I do." You better believe it.

   After the jokes and firm handshakes that ended the interview January walked out
into the blaze of the tropical noon and lit a cigarette. He allowed himself to feel how
much he despised the psychiatrist and his blind profession at the same time he was
waving good-bye to the man. Ounce brain. Why couldn't he have seen? Whatever
happened it would be his fault… With a rush of smoke out of him January realized
how painfully easy it was to fool someone if you wanted to. All action was no more
than a mask that could be perfectly manipulated from somewhere else. And all the
while in that somewhere else January lived in a click-click-click of film, in the silent
roaring of a dream, struggling against images he couldn't dispel. The heat of the
tropical sun-ninety-three million miles away, wasn't it?-pulsed painfully on the back of
his neck.

   As he watched the psychiatrist collar their tail-gunner Kochenski, he thought of
walking up to the man and saying / quit. I don't want to do this. In imagination he saw
the look that would form in the man's eye, in Fitch's eye, in Tibbets's eye, and his
mind recoiled from the idea. He felt too much contempt for them. He wouldn't for
anything give them a means to despise him, a reason to call him coward. Stubbornly
he banished the whole complex of thought. Easier to go along with it.

   And so a couple of disjointed days later, just after midnight of August 9th, he found
himself preparing for the strike. Around him Fitch and Matthews and Haddock were
doing the same. How odd were the everyday motions of getting dressed when you
were off to demolish a city, to end a hundred thousand lives! January found himself
examining his hands, his boots, the cracks in the linoleum. He put on his survival vest,
checked the pockets abstractedly for fish-hooks, water kit, first aid package,
emergency rations. Then the parachute harness, and his coveralls over it all. Tying his
bootlaces took minutes; he couldn't do it when watching his fingers so closely.

   "Come on, Professor!" Fitch's voice was tight. "The big day is here."

   He followed the others into the night. A cool wind was blowing. The chaplain said
a prayer for them. They took jeeps down Broadway to runway Able. Lucky Strike
stood in a circle of spotlights and men, half of them with cameras, the rest with
reporters' pads. They surrounded the crew; it reminded January of a Hollywood
premiere. Eventually he escaped up the hatch and into the plane. Others followed. Half
an hour passed before Fitch joined them, grinning like a movie star. They started the
engines, and January was thankful for their vibrating, thought-smothering roar. They
taxied away from the Hollywood scene and January felt relief for a moment, until he
remembered where they were going. On runway Able the engines pitched up to their
twenty-three hundred rpm whine, and looking out the clear windscreen he saw the
runway paintmarks move by even faster. Fitch kept them on the runway till Tinian had
run out from under them, then quickly pulled up. They were on their way.

  When they got to altitude January climbed past Fitch and McDonald to the
bombardier's seat and placed his parachute on it. He leaned back. The roar of the four
engines packed around him like cotton batting. He was on the flight, nothing to be
done about it now. The heavy vibration was a comfort, he liked the feel of it there in
the nose of the plane. A drowsy, sad acceptance hummed through him.

   Against his closed eyelids flashed a black eyeless face and he jerked awake, heart
racing. He was on the flight, no way out. Now he realized how easy it would have
been to get out of it. He could have just said he didn't want to. The simplicity of it
appalled him. Who gave a damn what the psychiatrist or Tibbets or anyone else
thought, compared to this? Now there was no way out. It was a comfort, in a way.
Now he could stop worrying, stop thinking he had any choice.

    Sitting there with his knees bracketing the bombsight January dozed, and as he
dozed he daydreamed his way out. He could climb the step to Fitch and McDonald
and declare he had been secretly promoted to major and ordered to redirect the
mission. They were to go to Tokyo and drop the bomb in the bay. The Jap war cabinet
had been told to watch this demonstration of the new weapon, and when they saw that
fireball boil the bay and bounce into heaven they'd run and sign surrender papers as
fast as they could write, kamikazes or not. They weren't crazy, after all. No need to
murder a whole city. It was such a good plan that the generals back home were no
doubt changing the mission at this very minute, desperately radioing their instructions
to Tinian, only to find out it was too late… so that when they returned to Tinian
January would become a hero for guessing what the generals realiy wanted, and for
risking all to do it. It would be like one of the Hornblower stories in the Saturday
Evening Post.

   Once again January jerked awake. The drowsy pleasure of the fantasy was replaced
with desperate scorn. There wasn't a chance in hell that he could convince Fitch and
the rest that he had secret orders superceding theirs. And he couldn't go up there and
wave his pistol around and order them to drop the bomb in Tokyo Bay, because he
was the one who had to actually drop it, and he couldn't be down in front dropping the
bomb and up ordering the others around at the same time. Pipe dreams.

   Time swept on, slow as a second hand. January's thoughts, however, matched the
spin of the props; desperately they cast about, now this way now that, like an animal
caught by the leg in a trap. The crew was silent. The clouds below were a white scree
on the black ocean. January's knee vibrated against the squat stand of the bombsight.
He was the one who had to drop the bomb. No matter where his thoughts lunged they
were brought up short by that. He was the one, not Fitch or the crew, not Le May, not
the generals and scientists back home, not Truman and his advisors. Truman-suddenly
January hated him. Roosevelt would have done it differently. If only Roosevelt had
lived! The grief that had filled January when he learned of Roosevelt's death
reverberated through him again more strongly than ever. It was unfair to have worked
so hard and then not see the war's end. And FDR would have ended it differently.
Back at the start of it all he had declared that civilian centers were never to be
bombed, and if he had lived, if, if, if. But he hadn't. And now it was smiling bastard
Harry Truman, ordering him, Frank January, to drop the sun on two hundred thousand
women and children. Once his father had taken him to see the Browns play before
twenty thousand, a giant crowd-"I never voted for you," January whispered viciously,
and jerked to realize he had spoken aloud. Luckily his microphone was off. And
Roosevelt would have done it differently-he would have.

    The bombsight rose before him, spearing the black sky and blocking some of the
hundreds of little cruciform stars. Lucky Strike ground on toward Iwo Jima, minute by
minute flying four miles closer to their target. January leaned forward and put his face
in the cool headrest of the bombsight, hoping that its grasp might hold his thoughts as
well as his forehead. It worked surprisingly well.

   His earphones crackled and he sat up. "Captain January." It was Shepard. "We're
going to arm the bomb now, want to watch?"

    "Sure thing." He shook his head, surprised at his own duplicity. Stepping up
between the pilots, he moved stiffly to the roomy cabin behind the cockpit. Matthews
was at his desk taking a navigational fix on the radio signals from Iwo Jima and
Okinawa, and Haddock stood beside him. At the back of the compartment was a small
circular hatch, below the larger tunnel leading to the rear of the plane. January opened
it, sat down and swung himself feet first through the hole.

   The bomb bay was unheated, and the cold air felt good. He stood facing the bomb.
Stone was sitting on the floor of the bay; Shepard was laid out under the bomb,
reaching into it. On a rubber pad next to Stone were tools, plates, several cylindrical
blocks. Shepard pulled back, sat up, sucked a scraped knuckle. He shook his head
ruefully: "I don't dare wear gloves with this one."

   "I'd be just as happy myself if you didn't let something slip," January joked
nervously. The two men laughed,

   "Nothing can blow till I change those green wires to the red ones," Stone said.

   "Give me the wrench," Shepard said. Stone handed it to him, and he stretched
under the bomb again. After some awkward wrenching inside it he lifted out a
cylindrical plug. "Breech plug," he said, and set it on the mat.

   January found his skin goose-pimpling in the cold air. Stone handed Shepard one of
the blocks. Shepard extended under the bomb again. "Red ends toward the breech."

   "I know." Watching them January was reminded of auto mechanics on the oily
floor of a garage, working under a car. He had spent a few years doing that himself,
after his family moved to Vicksburg. Hiroshima was a river town. One time a flatbed
truck carrying bags of cement powder down Fourth Street hill had lost its brakes and
careened into the intersec-tion with River Road, where despite the driver's efforts to
turn it smashed into a passing car. Frank had been out in the yard playing, had heard
the crash and saw the cement dust rising. He had been one of the first there. The
woman and child in the passenger seat of the Model T had been killed. The woman
driving was okay. They were from Chicago. A group of folks subdued the driver of the
truck, who kept trying to help at the Model T, though he had a bad cut on his head and
was covered with white dust.

   "Okay, let's tighten the breech plug." Stone gave Shepard the wrench. "Sixteen
turns exactly," Shepard said. He was sweating even in the bay's chill, and he paused to
wipe his forehead. "Let's hope we don't get hit by lightning." He put the wrench down
and shifted onto his knees, picked up a circular plate. Hubcap. January thought. Stone
connected wires, then helped Shepard install two more plates. Good old American
know-how, January thought, goose-pimples rippling across his skin like cat's-paws
over water. There was Shepard, a scientist, putting together a bomb like he was an
auto mechanic changing oil and plugs. January felt a tight rush of rage at the scientists
who had designed the bomb. They had worked on it for over a year down there in New
Mexico, had none of them in all that time ever stopped to think what they were doing?

   But none of them had to drop it. January turned to hide his face from Shepard,
stepped down the bay. The bomb looked like a big long trashcan, with fins at one end
and little antennae at the other. Just a bomb, he thought, damn it, it's just another
bomb.

   Shepard stood and patted the bomb gently. "We've got a live one now." Never a
thought about what it would do. January hurried by the man, afraid that hatred would
crack his shell and give him away. The pistol strapped to his belt caught on the
hatchway and he imagined shooting Shepard- shooting Fitch and McDonald and
plunging the controls forward so that Lucky Strike tilted and spun down into the sea
like a spent tracer bullet, like a plane broken by flak, following the arc of all human
ambition. Nobody would ever know what had happened to them, and their trashcan
would be dumped to the bottom of the Pacific where it belonged. He could even shoot
everyone and parachute out, and perhaps be rescued by one of the Superdumbos
following them…

   The thought passed and remembering it January squinted with disgust. But another
part of him agreed that it was a possibility. It could be done. It would solve his
problem. His fingers explored the snap on his holster.

   "Want some coffee?" Matthews asked.

   "Sure," January said, and took his hand from the gun to reach for the cup. He
sipped: hot. He watched Matthews and Benton tune the loran equipment. As the beeps
came in Matthews took a straightedge and drew lines from Okinawa and I wo Jima on
his map table. He tapped a finger on the intersection. "They've taken the art out of
navigation," he said to January. "They might as well stop making the navigator's
dome," thumbing up at the little Plexiglas bubble over them.

   "Good old American know-how," January said.

   Matthews nodded. With two fingers he measured the distance between their
position and Iwo Jima. Benton measured with a ruler.

   "Rendezvous at five thirty-five, eh?" Matthews said. They were to rendezvous with
the two trailing planes over Iwo.

   Benton disagreed. "I'd say five fifty."

   "What? Check again, guy, we're not in no tugboat here."
   "The wind-"

   "Yah, the wind. Frank, you want to add a bet to the pool?"

   "Five thirty-six," January said promptly.

   They laughed. "See, he's got more confidence in me," Matthews said with a dopey
grin.

   January recalled his plan to shoot the crew and tip the plane into the sea, and he
pursed his lips, repelled. Not for anything would he be able to shoot these men, who, if
not friends, were at least companions. They passed for friends. They meant no harm.

   Shepard and Stone climbed into the cabin. Matthews offered them coffee. "The
gimmick's ready to kick their ass, eh?" Shepard nodded and drank.

  January moved forward, past Haddock's console. Another plan that wouldn't work.
What to do? All the flight engineer's dials and gauges showed conditions were normal.
Maybe he could sabotage something? Cut a line somewhere?

   Fitch looked back at him and said, "When are we due over Iwo?"

   "Five forty, Matthews says."

   "He better be right."

   A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops
trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well-most of them,
anyway. Moving back past Haddock January stopped to stare at the group of men in
the navigation cabin. They joked, drank coffee. They were all a bit like Fitch: young
toughs, capable and thoughtless. They were having a good time, an adventure. That
was January's dominant impression of his companions in the 5O9th; despite all the
bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good
time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be
like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen's suits, prosperous and
balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed
and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing
nostalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the dead. Every year of this war
would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would always remain the central
experience of their lives-a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of
their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what
to do-so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies falling apart, lives in
one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and harder to thrust the
world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if they could only
return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the last one-
young, and free, and happy. And by that time they would hold the positions of power,
they would be capable of doing it.

    So there would be more wars, January saw. He heard it in Matthews's laughter, saw
it in their excited eyes. "There's Iwo, and it's five thirty-one. Pay up! I win!" And in
future wars they'd have more bombs like the gimmick, hundreds of them no doubt. He
saw more planes, more young crews like this one, flying to Moscow no doubt or to
wherever, fireballs in every capital, why not? And to what end? To what end? So that
the old men could hope to become magically young again. Nothing more sane than
that.

   They were over Iwo Jima. Three more hours to Japan. Voices from The Great
Artiste and Number 91 crackled on the radio. Rendezvous accomplished, the three
planes flew northwest, toward Shikoku, the first Japanese island in their path. January
went aft to use the toilet. "You okay, Frank?" Matthews asked. "Sure. Terrible coffee,
though."

    "Ain't it always." January tugged at his baseball cap and hurried away. Kochenski
and the other gunners were playing poker. When he was done he returned forward.
Matthews sat on the stool before his maps, reading his equipment for the constant
monitoring of drift that would now be required. Haddock and Benton were also busy
at their stations. January maneuvered between the pilots down into the nose. "Good
shooting," Matthews called after him.

   Forward it seemed quieter. January got settled, put his headphones on and leaned
forward to look out the ribbed Plexiglas.

   Dawn had turned the whole vault of the sky pink. Slowly the radiant shade shifted
through lavender to blue, pulse by pulse, a different color. The ocean below was a
glittering blue plane, marbled by a pattern of puffy pink cloud. The sky above was a
vast dome, darker above than on the horizon. January had always thought that dawn
was the time when you could see most clearly how big the earth was, and how high
above it they flew. It seemed they flew at the very upper edge of the atmosphere, and
January saw how thin it was, how it was just a skin of air really, so that even if you
flew up to its top the earth still extended away infinitely in every direction. The coffee
had warmed January, he was sweating. Sunlight blinked off the Plexiglas. His watch
said six. Plane and hemisphere of blue were split down the middle by the bomb-sight.
His earphones crackled and he listened in to the reports from the lead planes flying
over the target cities. Kokura, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, all of them had six-tenths cloud
cover. Maybe they would have to cancel the whole mission because of weather. "We'll
look at Hiroshima first." Fitch said. January peered down at the fields of miniature
clouds with renewed interest. His parachute slipped under him. Readjusting it he
imagined putting it on, sneaking back to the central escape hatch under the navigator's
cabin, opening the hatch… he could be out of the plane and gone before anyone
noticed. Leave it up to them. They could bomb or not but it wouldn't be January's
doing. He could float down onto the world like a puff of dandelion, feel cool air rush
around him, watch the silk canopy dome hang over him like a miniature sky, a private
world.

   An eyeless black face. January shuddered; it was as though the nightmare could
return any time. If he jumped nothing would change, the bomb would still fall-would
he feel any better, floating on his Inland Sea? Sure, one part of him shouted; maybe,
another conceded; the rest of him saw that face…

   Earphones crackled. Shepard said, "Lieutenant Stone has now armed the bomb, and
I can now tell you all what we are carrying. Aboard with us is the world's first atomic
bomb."

   Not exactly, January thought. Whistles squeaked in his earphones. The first one
went off in New Mexico. Splitting atoms: January had heard the term before.
Tremendous energy in every atom, Einstein had said. Break one, and-he had seen the
result on film. Shepard was talking about radiation, which brought back more to
January. Energy released in the form of X-rays. Killed by X-rays! It would be against
the Geneva Convention if they had thought of it.
   Fitch cut in. "When the bomb is dropped Lieutenant Ben-ton will record our
reaction to what we see. This recording is being made for history, so watch your
language." Watch your language! January choked back a laugh. Don't curse or
blaspheme God at the sight of the first atomic bomb incinerating a city and all its
inhabitants with X-rays!

   Six twenty. January found his hands clenched together on the headrest of the
bombsight. He felt as if he had a fever. In the harsh wash of morning light the skin on
the backs of his hands appeared slightly translucent. The whorls in the skin looked like
the delicate patterning of waves on the sea's surface. His hands were made of atoms.
Atoms were the smallest building blocks of matter, it took billions of them to make
those tense, trembling hands. Split one atom and you had the fireball. That meant that
the energy contained in even one hand… he turned up a palm to look at the lines and
the mottled flesh under the transparent skin. A person was a bomb that could blow up
the world. January felt that latent power stir in him, pulsing with every hard heart-
knock. What beings they were, and in what a blue expanse of a world! -And here they
spun on to drop a bomb and kill a hundred thousand of these astonishing beings.

   When a fox or a raccoon is caught by the leg in a trap, it lunges until the leg is
frayed, twisted, perhaps broken, and only then does the animal's pain and exhaustion
force it to quit. Now in the same way January wanted to quit. His mind hurt. His plans
to escape were so much crap-stupid, useless. Better to quit. He tried to stop thinking,
but it was hopeless. How could he stop? As long as he was conscious he would be
thinking. The mind struggles longer in its traps than any fox.

    Lucky Strike tilted up and began the long climb to bombing altitude. On the
horizon the clouds lay over a green island. Japan. Surely it had gotten hotter, the
heater must be broken, he thought. Don't think. Every few minutes Matthew gave
Fitch small course adjustments. "Two seventy-five, now. That's it." To escape the
moment January recalled his childhood. Following a mule and plow. Moving to
Vicksburg (rivers). For a while there in Vicksburg, since his stutter made it hard to
gain friends, he had played a game with himself. He had passed the time by imagining
that everything he did was vitally important and determined the fate of the world. If he
crossed a road in front of a certain car, for instance, then the car wouldn't make it
through the next intersection before a truck hit it, and so the man driving would be
killed and wouldn't be able to invent the flying boat that would save President Wilson
from kidnappers-so he had to wait for that car because everything afterward depended
on it, oh damn it, he thought, damn it, think of something different. The last
Hornblower story he had read-how would he get out of this? The round O of his
mother's face as she ran in and saw his arm- The Mississippi, mud-brown behind its
levees- Abruptly he shook his head, face twisted in frustration and despair, aware at
last that no possible avenue of memory would serve as an escape for him now, for now
there was no part of his life that did not apply to the situation he was in, and no matter
where he cast his mind it was going to shore up against the hour facing him.

   Less than an hour. They were at thirty thousand feet, bombing altitude. Fitch gave
him altimeter readings to dial into the bombsight, Matthews gave him windspeeds.
Sweat got in his eye and he blinked furiously. The sun rose behind them like an atomic
bomb, glinting off every corner and edge of the Plexiglas, illuminating his bubble
compartment with a fierce glare. Broken plans jumbled together in his mind, his breath
was short, his throat dry. Uselessly and repeatedly he damned the scientists, damned
Truman. Damned the Japanese for causing the whole mess in the first place, damned
yellow killers, they had brought this on themselves. Remember Pearl. American men
had died under bombs when no war had been declared; they had started it and now it
was coming back to them with a vengeance. And they deserved it. And an invasion of
Japan would take years, cost millions of lives-end it now, end it they deserved it, they
deserved it steaming river full of charcoal people silently dying damned stubborn race
of maniacs!

   "There's Honshu," Fitch said, and January returned to the world of the plane. They
were over the Inland Sea. Soon they would pass the secondary target Kokura, a bit to
the south. Seven thirty. The island was draped more heavily than the sea by clouds,
and again January's heart leaped with the idea that weather would cancel the mission.
But they did deserve it. It was a mission like any other mission. He had dropped
bombs on Africa, Sicily, Italy, all Germany… He leaned forward to take a look
through the sight. Under the X of the crosshairs was the sea, but at the lead edge of the
sight was land. Honshu. At two hundred and thirty miles an hour that gave them about
a half hour to Hiroshima. Maybe less. He wondered if his heart could beat so hard for
that long.

   Fitch said, "Matthews, I'm giving over guidance to you. Just tell us what to do."

   "Bear south two degrees," was all Matthews said. At last their voices had taken on
a touch of awareness, even fear.
   "January, are you ready?" Fitch asked.

   "I'm just waiting," January said. He sat up, so Fitch could see the back of his head.
The bombsight stood between his legs. A switch on its side would start the bombing
sequence; the bomb would not leave the plane immediately upon the flick of the
switch, but would drop after a fifteen-second radio tone warned the following planes.
The sight was adjusted accordingly.

   "Adjust to a heading of two sixty-five," Matthews said. "We're coming in directly
upwind." This was to make any side-drift adjustments for the bomb unnecessary.
"January, dial it down to two hundred and tkirty-one miles per hour."

   "Two thirty-one."

   Fitch said, "Everyone but January and Matthews, get your goggles on."

   January took the darkened goggles from the floor. One needed to protect one's eyes
or they might melt. He put them on, put his forehead on the headrest. They were in the
way. He .took them off. When he looked through the sight again there was land under
the crosshairs. He checked his watch. Eight o'clock. Up and reading the papers,
drinking tea.

   "Ten minutes to AP," Matthews said. The aiming point was Aioi Bridge, a T-
shaped bridge in the middle of the delta-straddling city. Easy to recognize.

   "There's a lot of cloud down there," Fitch noted. "Are you going to be able to see?"

   "I won't be sure until we try it," January said.

   "We can make another pass and use radar if we need to," Matthews said.

   Fitch said, "Don't drop it unless you're sure, January."

   "Yes sir."

   Through the sight a grouping of rooftops and gray roads was just visible between
broken clouds. Around it green forest. "All right," Matthews exclaimed, "here we go!
Keep it right on this heading, Captain! January, we'll stay at two thirty-one."

  "And same heading," Fitch said. "January, she's all yours. Everyone make sure your
goggles are on. And be ready for the turn."

    January's world contracted to the view through the bomb-sight. A stippled field of
cloud and forest. Over a small range of hills and into Hiroshima's watershed. The
broad river was mud brown, the land pale hazy green, the growing network of roads
flat gray. Now the tiny rectangular shapes of buildings covered almost all the land, and
swimming into the sight came the city proper, narrow islands thrusting into a dark blue
bay. Under the crosshairs the city moved island by island, cloud by cloud. January had
stopped breathing, his fingers were rigid as stone on the switch. And there was Aioi
Bridge. It slid right under the crosshairs, a tiny T right in a gap in the clouds. January's
fingers crushed the switch. Deliberately he took a breath, held it. Clouds swam under
the crosshairs, then the next island. "Almost there," he said calmly into his
microphone. "Steady." Now that he was committed his heart was humming like the
Wrights. He counted to ten. Now flowing under the crosshairs were clouds alternating
with green forest, leaden roads. "I've turned the switch, but I'm not getting a tone!" he
croaked into the mike. His right hand held the switch firmly in place. Fitch was
shouting something-

   Matthews's voice cracked across it-"Flipping it b-back and forth," January shouted,
shielding the bombsight with his body from the eyes of the pilots. "But still-wait a
second-"

   He pushed the switch down. A low hum filled his ears. "That's it! It started!"

   "But where will it land?" Matthews cried.

   "Hold steady!" January shouted.

  Lucky Strike shuddered and lofted up ten or twenty feet. January twisted to look
down and there was the bomb, flying just below the plane. Then with a wobble it fell
away.

   The plane banked right and dove so hard that the centrifugal force threw January
against the Plexiglas. Several thousand feet lower Fitch leveled it out and they hurtled
north;

   "Do you see anything?" Fitch cried.

   From the tailgun Kochenski gasped, "Nothing." January struggled upright. He
reached for the welder's goggles, but they were no longer on his head. He couldn't find
them. "How long has it been?" he said.

   "Thirty seconds," Matthews replied.

   January clamped his eyes shut.

   The blood in his eyelids lit up red, then white.

   On the earphones a clutter of voices: "Oh my God. Oh my God." The plane
bounced and tumbled, metallically shrieking. January pressed himself off the
Plexiglas. " 'Nother Shockwave!" Kochenski yelled. The plane rocked again, bounced
out of control, this is it, January thought, end of the world, I guess that solves my
problem.

   He opened his eyes and found he could still see. The engines still roared, the props
spun. "Those were the Shockwaves from the bomb," Fitch called. "We're okay now.
Look at that! Will you look at that sonofabitch go!"

   January looked. The cloud layer below had burst apart, and a black column of
smoke billowed up from a core of red fire. Already the top of the column was at their
height. Exclamations of shock clattered painfully in January's ears. He stared at the
fiery base of the cloud, at the scores of fires feeding into it. Suddenly he could see past
the cloud, and his fingernails cut into his palms. Through a gap in the clouds he saw it
clearly, the delta, the six rivers, there off to the left of the tower of smoke: the city of
Hiroshima, untouched.

   "We missed!" Kochenski yelled. "We missed it!"

   January turned to hide his face from the pilots; on it was a grin like a rictus. He sat
back in his seat and let the relief fill him.
   Then it was back to it. "God damn it!" Fitch shouted down at him. McDonald was
trying to restrain him. "January, get up here!"

   "Yes sir." Now there was a new set of problems.

  January stood and turned, legs weak. His right fingertips throbbed painfully. The
men were crowded forward to look out the Plexiglas. January looked with them.

   The mushroom cloud was forming. It roiled out as if it might continue to extend
forever, fed by the inferno and the black stalk below it. It looked about two miles
wide, and half a mile tall, and it extended well above the height they flew at, dwarfing
their plane entirely. "Do you think we'll all be sterile?" Matthews said.

   "I can taste the radiation," McDonald declared. "Can you? It tastes like lead."

   Bursts of flame shot up into the cloud from below, giving a purplish tint to the
stalk. There it stood: lifelike, malignant, sixty thousand feet tall. One bomb. January
shoved past the pilots into the navigation cabin, overwhelmed.

   "Should I start recording everyone's reactions, Captain?" asked Benton.

   "To hell with that," Fitch said, following January back. But Shepard got there first,
descending quickly from the navigation dome. He rushed across the cabin, caught
January on the shoulder, "You bastard!" he screamed as January stumbled back. "You
lost your nerve, coward!"

   January went for Shepard, happy to have a target at last, but Fitch cut in and
grabbed him by the collar, pulled him around until they were face to face-

   "Is that right?" Fitch cried, as angry as Shepard. "Did you screw up on purpose?"

   "No," January grunted, and knocked Fitch's hands away from his neck. He swung
and smacked Fitch on the mouth, caught him solid. Fitch staggered back, recovered,
and no doubt would have beaten January up, but Matthews and Benton and Stone
leaped in and held him back, shouting for order. "Shut up! Shut up!" McDonald
screamed from the cockpit, and for a moment it was bedlam, but Fitch let himself be
restrained, and soon only McDonald's shouts for quiet were heard. January retreated to
between the pilot seats, right hand on his pistol holster.

   "The city was in the crosshairs when I flipped the switch," he said. "But the first
couple of times I flipped it nothing happened-"

   "That's a lie!" Shepard shouted. "There was nothing wrong with the switch, I
checked it myself. Besides the bomb exploded miles beyond Hiroshima, look for
yourself! That's minutes.''1 He wiped spit from his chin and pointed at January. "You
did it."

   "You don't know that," January said. But he could see the men had been convinced
by Shepard, and he took a step back. "You just get me to a board of inquiry, quick.
And leave me alone till then. If you touch me again"-glaring venomously at Fitch and
then Shepard-"I'll shoot you." He turned and hopped down to his seat, feeling exposed
and vunerable, like a treed raccoon.

   "They'll shoot you for this," Shepard screamed after him. "Disobeying orders-
treason-" Matthews and Stone were shutting him up.

   "Let's get out of here," he heard McDonald say. "I can taste the lead, can't you?''

   January looked out the Plexiglas. The giant cloud still burned and roiled. One
atom… Well, they had really done it to that forest. He almost laughed but stopped
himself, afraid of hysteria. Through a break in the clouds he got a clear view of
Hiroshima for the first time. It lay spread over its islands like a map, unharmed. Well,
that was that. The inferno at the base of the mushroom cloud was eight or ten miles
around the shore of the bay, and a mile or two inland. A certain patch of forest would
be gone, destroyed-utterly blasted from the face of the earth. The Japs would be able
to go out and investigate the damage. And if they were told it was a demonstration, a
warning-and if they acted fast- well, they had their chance. Maybe it would work.

   The release of tension made January feel sick. Then he recalled Shepard's words
and he knew that whether his plan worked or not he was still in trouble. In trouble! It
was worse than that. Bitterly he cursed the Japartese, he even wished for a moment
that he had dropped it on them. Wearily he let his despair empty him.
   A long while later he sat up straight. Once again he was a trapped animal. He began
lunging for escape, casting about for plans. One alternative after another. All during
the long grim flight home he considered it, mind spinning at the speed of the props and
beyond. And when they came down on Tinian he had a plan. It was a long shot, he
reckoned, but it was the best he could do.

   The briefing hut was surrounded by MPs again. January stumbled from the truck
with the rest and walked inside. He was more than ever aware of the looks given him,
and they were hard, accusatory. He was too tired to care. He hadn't slept in more than
thirty-six hours, and had slept very little since the last time he had been in the hut, a
week before. Now the room quivered with the lack of engine vibration to stabilize it,
and the silence roared. It was all he could do to hold on to the bare essentials of his
plan. The glares of Fitch and Shepard, the hurt incomprehension of Matthews, they
had to be thrust out of his focus. Thankfully he lit a cigarette.

   In a clamor of question and argument the others described the strike. Then the
haggard Scholes and an intelligence officer led them through the bombing run.
January's plan made it necessary to hold to his story: "… and when the AP was under
the crosshairs I pushed down the switch, but got no signal. I flipped it up and down
repeatedly until the tone kicked in. At that point there was still fifteen seconds to the
release."

   "Was there anything that may have caused the tone to start when it did?"

   "Not that I noticed immediately, but-"

   "It's impossible," Shepard interrupted, face red. "I checked the switch before we
flew and there was nothing wrong with it. Besides, the drop occurred over a minute-"

   "Captain Shepard," Scholes said. "We'll hear from you presently."

   "But he's obviously lying-"

   "Captain Shepard! It's not at all obvious. Don't speak unless questioned."

   "Anyway," January said, hoping to shift the questions away from the issue of the
long delay, "I noticed something about the bomb when it was falling that could
explain why it stuck. I need to discuss it with one of the scientists familiar with the
bomb's design."

   "What was that?" Scholes asked suspiciously.

   January hesitated. "There's going to be an inquiry, right?"

   Scholes frowned. "This is the inquiry, Captain January. Tell us what you saw."

   "But there will be some proceeding beyond this one?"

   "It looks like there's going to be a court-martial, yes, Captain."

   "That's what I thought. I don't want to talk to anyone but my counsel, and some
scientist familiar with the bomb."

  "I'm a scientist familiar with the bomb," Shepard burst out. "You could tell me if
you really had anything, you-"

   "I said I need a scientist!" January exclaimed, rising to face the scarlet Shepard
across the table. "Not a G-God damned mechanic." Shepard started to shout, others
joined in and the room rang with argument. While Scholes restored order January sat
down, and he refused to be drawn out again.

   "I'll see you're assigned counsel, and initiate the court-martial," Scholes said,
clearly at a loss. "Meanwhile you are under arrest, on suspicion of disobeying orders
in combat." January nodded, and Scholes gave him over to the MPs.

   "One last thing," January said, fighting exhaustion. "Tell General Le May that if the
Japs are told this drop was a warning, it might have the same effect as-"

   "I told you!" Shepard shouted. "I told you he did it on purpose!"

  Men around Shepard restrained him. But he had convinced most of them, and even
Matthews stared at January with surprised anger.

   January shook his head wearily. He had the dull feeling that his plan, while it had
succeeded so far, was ultimately not a good one. "Just trying to make the best of it." It
took all of his remaining will to force his legs to carry him in a dignified manner out
of the hut.

   His cell was an empty NCO's office. MPs brought his meals. For the first couple of
days he did little but sleep. On the third day he glanced out the officer's barred
window, and saw a tractor pulling a tarpaulin-draped trolley out of the compound,
followed by jeeps filled with MPs. It looked like a military funeral. January rushed to
the door and banged on it until one of the young MPs came.

   "What's that they're doing out there?" January demanded. .Eyes cold and mouth
twisted, the MP said, "They're making another strike. They're going to do it right this
time."

   "No!" January cried. "No!" He rushed the MP, who knocked him back and locked
the door. "No!" He beat the door until his hands hurt, cursing wildly. "You don't need
to do it, it isn't necessary.'" Shell shattered at last, he collapsed on the bed and wept.
Now everything he had done would be rendered meaningless. He had sacrificed
himself for nothing.

    A day or two after that the MPs led in a colonel, an iron-haired man who stood
stiffly and crushed January's hand when he shook it. His eyes were a pale, icy blue.

   "I am Colonel Dray," he said. "I have been ordered to defend you at the court-
martial." January could feel the dislike pouring from the man. "To do that I'm going to
need every fact you have, so let's get started."

   "I'm not talking to anybody until I've seen an atomic scientist."

   "I am your defense counsel-"

   "I don't care who you are," January said. "Your defense of me depends on you
getting one of the scientists here. The higher up he is, the better. And I want to speak
to him alone."

   "I will have to be present."
   So he would do it. But now January's counsel, too, was an enemy.

  "Naturally," January said. "You're my counsel. But no one else. Our atomic secrecy
may depend on it."

   "You saw evidence of sabotage?"

   "Not one word more until that scientist is here."

   Angrily the colonel nodded and left.

   Late the next day the colonel returned with another man. "This is Dr. Forest."

    "I helped develop the bomb," Forest said. He had a crew cut and dressed in
fatigues, and to January he looked more Army than the colonel. Suspiciously he stared
back and forth at the two men.

   "You'll vouch for this man's identity on your word as an officer?" he asked Dray.

   "Of course," the colonel said stiffly, offended.

   "So," Dr. Forest said. '"You had some trouble getting it off when you wanted to.
Tell me what you saw."

   "I saw nothing,'" January said harshly. He took a deep breath; it was time to
commit himself. "I want you to take a message back to the scientists. You folks have
been working on this thing for years, and you must have had time to consider how the
bomb should have been used. You know we could have convinced the Japs to
surrender by showing them a demonstration-"

   "Wait a minute," Forest said. "You're saying you didn't see anything? There wasn't
a malfunction?"

  "That's right," January said, and cleared his throat. "It wasn't necessary, do you
understand?"

   Forest was looking at Colonel Dray. Dray gave him a disgusted shrug. "He told me
he saw evidence of sabotage."

   "I want you to go back and ask the scientists to intercede for me," January said,
raising his voice to get the man's attention. "I haven't got a chance in that court-
martial. But if the scientists defend me then maybe they'll let me live, see? I don't want
to get shot for doing something every one of you scientists would have done."

   Dr. Forest had backed away. Color rising, he said, "What makes you think that's
what we would have done? Don't you think we considered it? Don't you think men
better qualified than you made the decision?" He waved a hand- "God damn it-what
made you think you were competent to decide something as important as that!"

   January was appalled at the man's reaction; in his plan it had gone differently.
Angrily he jabbed a finger at Forest. "Because / was the man doing it, Doctor Forest.
You take even one step back from that and suddenly you can pretend it's not your
doing. Fine for you, but / was there."

   At every word the man's color was rising. It looked like he might pop a vein in his
neck. January tried once more. "Have you ever tried to imagine what one of your
bombs would do to a city full of people?"

   "I've had enough!" the man exploded. He turned to Dray. "I'm under no obligation
to keep what I've heard here confidential. You can be sure it will be used as evidence
in Captain January's court-martial." He turned and gave January a look of such blazing
hatred that January understood it. For these men to admit he was right would mean
admitting that they were wrong-that every one of them was responsible for his part in
the construction of the weapon January had refused to use. Understanding that,
January knew he was doomed.

    The bang of Dr. Forest's departure still shook the little office. January sat on his
cot, got out a smoke. Under Colonel Dray's cold gaze he lit one shakily, took a drag.
He looked up at the colonel, shrugged. "It was my best chance," he explained. That did
something-for the first and only time the cold disdain in the colonel's eyes shifted, to a
little hard, lawyerly gleam of respect.

  The court-martial lasted two days. The verdict was guilty of disobeying orders in
combat, and of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The sentence was death by firing
squad.

   For most of his remaining days January rarely spoke, drawing ever further behind
the mask that had hidden him for so long. A clergyman came to see him, but it was the
5O9th's chaplain, the one who had said the prayer blessing the Lucky Strike's mission
before they took off. Angrily January sent him packing.

    Later, however, a young Catholic priest dropped by. His name was Patrick Getty.
He was a little pudgy man, bespectacled and, it seemed, somewhat afraid of January.
January let the man talk to him. When he returned the next day January talked back a
bit, and on the day after that he talked some more. It became a habit.

   Usually January talked about his childhood. He talked of plowing mucky black
bottom land behind a mule. Of running down the lane to the mailbox. Of reading
books by the light of the moon after he had been ordered to sleep, and of being beaten
by his mother for it with a high-heeled shoe. He told the priest the story of the time his
arm had been burnt, and about the car crash at the bottom of Fourth Street. "It's the
truck driver's face I remember, do you see, Father?"

   "Yes," the young priest said. "Yes."

   And he told him about the game he had played in which every action he took tipped
the balance of world affairs. "When I remembered that game I thought it was dumb.
Step on a sidewalk crack and cause an earthquake-you know, it's stupid. Kids are like
that." The priest nodded. "But now I've been thinking that if everybody were to live
their whole lives like that, thinking that every move they made really was important,
then… it might make a difference." He waved a hand vaguely, expelled cigarette
smoke. "You're accountable for what you do."

   "Yes," the priest said. "Yes, you are."

  "And if you're given orders to do something wrong, you're still accountable, right?
The orders don't change it."

   "That's right."

   "Hmph." January smoked awhile. "So they say, anyway. But look what happens."
He waved at the office. "I'm like the guy in a story I read-he thought everything in
books was true, and after reading a bunch of westerns he tried to rob a train. They
tossed him in jail." He laughed shortly. "Books are full of crap."

   "Not all of them," the priest said. "Besides, you weren't trying to rob a train."

   They laughed at the notion. "Did you read that story?"

   "No."

   "It was the strangest book-there were two stories in it, and they alternated chapter
by chapter, but they didn't have a thing to do with each other! I didn't get it."

   "… Maybe the writer was trying to say that everything connects to everything
else."

   "Maybe. But it's a funny way to say it."

   "I like it."

   And so they passed the time, talking.

   So it was the priest who was the one to come by and tell January that his request for
a Presidential pardon had been refused. Getty said awkwardly, "It seems the President
approves the sentence."

   "That bastard," January said weakly. He sat on his cot.

   Time passed. It was another hot, humid day.

  "Well," the priest said. "Let me give you some better news. Given your situation I
don't think telling you matters, though I've been told not to. The second mission-you
know there was a second strike?"

   "Yes."

   "Well, they missed too."
   "What?" January cried, and bounced to his feet. "You're kidding!"

   "No. They flew to Kokura, but found it covered by clouds. It was the same over
Nagasaki and Hiroshima, so they flew back to Kokura and tried to drop the bomb
using radar to guide it, but apparently there was a-a genuine equipment failure this
time, and the bomb fell on an island."

   January was hopping up and down, mouth hanging open, "So we n-never-"

   "We never dropped an atom bomb on a Japanese city. That's right." Getty grinned.
"And get this-I heard this from my superior-they sent a message to the Japanese
government telling them that the two explosions were warnings, and that if they didn't
surrender by September first we would drop bombs on Kyoto and Tokyo, and then
wherever else we had to. Word is that the Emperor went to Hiroshima to survey the
damage, and when he saw it he ordered the Cabinet to surrender. So…"

   "So it worked," January said. He hopped around, "It worked, it worked!"

   "Yes."

   "Just like I said it would!" he cried, and hopping before the priest he laughed.

  Getty was jumping around a little too, and the sight of the priest bouncing was too
much for January. He sat on his cot and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.

   "So-" He sobered quickly. "So Truman's going to shoot me anyway, eh?"

   "Yes," the priest said unhappily. "I guess that's right."

   This time January's laugh was bitter. "He's a bastard, all right. And proud of being a
bastard, which makes it worse.'' He shook his head. "If Roosevelt had lived…"

   "It would have been different," Getty finished. "Yes. Maybe so. But he didn't." He
sat beside January. "Cigarette?" He held out a pack, and January noticed the white
wartime wrapper. He frowned.
   "You haven't got a Camel?"

   "Oh. Sorry."

   "Oh well. That's all right." January took one of the Lucky Strikes, lit up. "That's
awfully good news." He breathed out. "I never believed Truman would pardon me
anyway, so mostly you've brought good news. Ha. They missed. You have no idea
how much better that makes me feel."

   "I think I do."

   January smoked the cigarette.

  "… So I'm a good American after all. I am a good American," he insisted. "No
matter what Truman says."

   "Yes," Getty replied, and coughed. "You're better than Truman any day."

   "Better watch what you say, Father." He looked into the eyes behind the glasses,
and the expression he saw there gave him pause. Since the drop every look directed at
him had been filled with contempt. He'd seen it so often during the court-martial that
he'd learned to stop looking; and now he had to teach himself to see again. The priest
looked at him as if he were… as if he were some kind of hero. That wasn't exactly
right. But seeing it…

   January would not live to see the years that followed, so he would never know what
came of his action. He had given up casting his mind forward and imagining
possibilities, because there was no point to it. His planning was ended. In any case he
would not have been able to imagine the course of the post-war years. That the world
would quickly become an armed camp pitched on the edge of atomic war, he might
have predicted. But he never would have guessed that so many people would join a
January Society. He would never know of the effect the Society had on Dewey during
the Korean crisis, never know of the Society's successful campaign for the test ban
treaty, and never learn that thanks in part to the Society and its allies, a treaty would be
signed by the great powers that would reduce the number of atomic bombs year by
year, until there were none left.
   Frank January would never know any of that. But in that moment on his cot
looking into the eyes of young Patrick Getty, he guessed an inkling of it-he felt, just
for an instant, the impact on history.

   And with that he relaxed. In his last week everyone who met him carried away the
same impression, that of a calm, quiet man, angry at Truman and others, but in a
withdrawn, matter-of-fact way. Patrick Getty, a strong force in the January Society
ever after, said January was talkative for some time after he learned of the missed
attack on Kokura. Then he became quieter and quieter, as the day approached. On the
morning that they woke him at dawn to march him out to a hastily constructed
execution shed, his MPs shook his hand. The priest was with him as he smoked a final
cigarette, and they prepared to put the hood over his head. January looked at him
calmly. "They load one of the guns with a blank cartridge, right?"

   "Yes," Getty said.

   "So each man in the squad can imagine he may not have shot me?"

   "Yes. That's right."

    A tight, unhumorous smile was January's last expression. He threw down the
cigarette, ground it out, poked the priest in the arm. "But I know." Then the mask
slipped back into place for good, making the hood redundant, and with a firm step
January went to the wall. One might have said he was at peace.