People wanted to see the Little Bomber that Could, so we did our bond-rally tour in the Morgana. I was worried about that. We’d gone to all this trouble to keep what we’d brought back from influencing anything, and here I am, flying goddamn Chitty Chitty Bang Bang from one whistle stop to another. So I told the brass I only trusted Wen to work on the ship. Everybody thinks pilots are spoiled and superstitious, and sometimes you can put that to work for you. So we hid our hotrodded bomber by showing her off to everybody and his brother.
One day we were at a rally selling war bonds, and some wiseacre shakes my hand and says, “So I guess you boys got your meal ticket without having to fly your twenty-five, huh?” It really got under my skin. It’s not that I wanted to go back. No one in his right mind would want to be in that mess. But I was a bomber pilot, and they had me barnstorming to sell bonds.
But if I went back to combat duty, my crew would go back, too, like it or not, and that didn’t seem fair. So one night I called a crew meeting and told them what I wanted to do. Said I didn’t expect everybody to feel the same as me, and that it was a crew decision, not a command decision, and I wanted it put to a vote. I’d stay on with our bond push if that’s what they wanted.
But every one of them wanted to go back. Even Garrett and Everett, who were getting girls like movie stars, just nodded their heads and said they’d rather be on the roster. I was proud of them, but a little surprised, too, and I said so.
That’s when Shorty stood up. I never saw him so upset. He looked at everybody and said, “You all know why you want to go back, and it’s not just because we have a job to do. It’s because we don’t belong here.” He looked at me, and I got the feeling he wanted me to stop him from saying what he was about to say. But I didn’t, because I thought I knew what that was going to be.
He said, “I don’t mean we don’t belong the way vets feel when they come back home. And I’m not talking about feeling like we ought to be back in the war instead of smiling for cameras. I mean just what I said. We. Don’t. Belong. Here.”
He talked about how he’d been joking around with a bunch of reporters right after he won his Jack Benny contest. He’d done his Rochester impression, and they just looked at him. One of them said, “Who’s that supposed to be?”
Now, Jack Benny had one of the most popular shows in America. Rochester was his—well, I guess you’d call him a valet. That’s why Wen named the bug after him. The second you heard that voice, you knew who it was—and everybody had heard that voice. And Shorty’s Rochester imitation was dead-on.
Shorty just figured they’d been gaslighting him and put it out of his mind. Then after our last USO show he was flirting with some girls, and he did a Benny line, and he was about to do Rochester saying “No, suh, Mistah Benny!” But some know-it-all interrupted him and said, “Oh, I do take exception, sir!” in this hoity-toity Limey accent. And everyone around him cracked up laughing. “I asked the guy who that was supposed to be,” Shorty told us, “and he said, ‘You’re kidding, right? That was Winchester—Benny’s butler.’ ”
So Shorty made sure to catch the next Benny broadcast, and there it was. “Winchester, did you take my car out?” “No, I only take exception, sir.”
Shorty pointed at all of us like a prosecutor at the end of a murder trial. “And you all know it’s not just me,” he said. He brought up Plavitz’s gaffe with Glenn Miller. Plavitz nodded and looked upset. “I looked it up, but I couldn’t find it,” he told us. “But ‘King Porter Stomp’ was the last song I danced to with my girl before I joined up. You don’t forget a thing like that.”
Then Garrett spoke up. He’d tried to buy a Snickers bar at a soda fountain, and the guy behind the counter had never even heard of them.
So I told them about my father’s car. He was a doctor, and right before the war he bought a Nash 600. Doctors still made house calls back then, and he bought it because the 600 would go forever on a tank of gas. My last letter home, I asked him how the old Nash was doing. He wrote back and asked me who’s this Nash person? He wasn’t joking. He’d never heard of it.
Once it was out in the open it was scary. Things all of us knew we remembered were something else now. Or they weren’t there at all. Not the big stuff. There were still forty-eight states, we were still fighting Germany and Japan. But things like that don’t have to be big to make you think something’s wrong with your head. And that is one scary feeling.
Leave it to Boney to hit the bullseye. We’re still trying to figure out why things aren’t adding up, and Boney leans forward and says, “We came back, but we didn’t come back all the way.”
I will never forget that moment. The way we looked at each other. Knowing that was it. That we’d come back to the past, but not to our past. And realizing that the mission hadn’t really ended. That it never would. We were all getting back-slaps and free drinks and pretty girls, and not one of us wanted to stay there, because it wasn’t our world. I guess it wasn’t our war, either, but that’s not how we thought about it. You expect to be frightened by the war. You don’t expect to be scared of the world you come home to after it.
I told everybody that I would put in for a return to combat duty the next day. Then I went to bed and had the first good night’s sleep I’d had in months. Two days later Germany surrendered.
Everybody got their orders pretty fast after that. Me and Jerry got falling-down drunk the day he got his. I re-enlisted. I didn’t have a girl waiting for me—not in California, anyway. And where else would I get to fly the new jets that were coming?
They took apart the air bases in England so fast you’d think we got evicted. In ’Forty-eight the Russians raised the drawbridge on Berlin, and me and about a thousand other pilots airlifted supplies from Wiesbaden to Tempelhof. I’d spent a lot of time tearing that country up, and it felt good to pay some of it back.
Jerry and I kept in pretty good touch, and one day he wrote and told me he’d tracked the Morgana to a holding field in Arkansas. The Army had brought all the bombers back to melt them down for scrap. I’d been worried what might happen if someone looked under the Morgana’s hood and got an education, so I should have been relieved. But that wasn’t how I felt. All those mission stencils and girls painted on noses, blood in the metal, and then just stacks of aluminum bars. It breaks your heart.
Then Jerry wrote me that he and Wen had bought the Morgana from the Army for three hundred and fifty dollars. I couldn’t believe it. I asked him what he thought he was going to do with her. He said he’d think of something. He did, too. Him and Wen went into business. Blue and Gray Technology. Yep, that BGT, and that Gerald Broben. They reverse-engineered the Morgana and figured out other things they’d seen in the future. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Wen salvaged that damned bug from the Channel and took it apart, too. I was worried as hell about the can of worms they were opening, but they took it slow, released things in small doses. First thing they came out with was an omnidirectional forklift, the Sammy. It made them rich.