Charlie went to Stas Mikoian, who was the most reasonable of Joe Steele’s longtime cronies. “You know, if the boss wants to get reelected in 1952, he’s got to do something more about the Japanese War,” he said.
Mikoian smiled at him. “If the boss wants to get reelected in 1952, he’ll get reelected in 1952, and you can take that to the bank.”
“He’ll have to cook the books harder than usual to make sure nothing goes wrong,” Charlie said.
“Nothing will go wrong.” Stas Mikoian kept smiling. Was it an I-know-something-you-don’t-know smile? Charlie didn’t especially think so at the time. At the time, all he thought was that Mikoian should have paid more attention to him. Afterwards, though, he wondered.
And the Japanese War and its misfortunes weren’t limited to the far side of the Pacific. A few days after Charlie talked with Mikoian, he saw a little story in the Washington Post some AP stringer in New Mexico had filed. An ammunition dump exploded in the desert about a hundred miles south of Albuquerque, it read. The blast, which took place in the predawn hours, lit up the bleak countryside and could be heard for miles. The cause is still under investigation. No casualties were reported.
Casualties or not, somebody’s head will roll, Charlie thought. Sounds like it was a big boom. Good thing it was off in the middle of nowhere. That’s where they need to keep ammunition dumps. He read the story again. That bleak argued the reporter wasn’t from New Mexico. He smiled to himself, there in the office. If his life hadn’t got tangled up with Joe Steele’s, he might have written the paragraph in the paper himself.
He wondered if he would be happier now had he kept on writing for the Associated Press. It wouldn’t have been hard to arrange. If he’d taken a leak a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later in that Chicago greasy spoon in 1932, so he didn’t hear Vince Scriabin talking to, well, somebody. . Those few minutes, the chance filling of his bladder, made all the difference in the world to his life, and to Mike’s, too.
You could drive yourself clean around the bend if you started wondering about stuff like that. What if Joe Steele’s folks had stayed in the old country instead of coming to America? What would he have become over there? A priest? A Red? Nothing very much? That was the way to bet. The United States was the land of opportunity, the place where a man could rise from nothing to-to five terms in the White House.
People always liked to believe they were the masters of their souls and the captains of their fate. But just because you liked to believe it didn’t make it true. It seemed at least as likely that people bounced at random off the paddles of God’s pinball machine, and that they could as easily have bounced some other way.
In a similar vein, hadn’t Einstein said God didn’t play dice with the universe? Something like that, anyhow. But Einstein himself had crapped out before his appointed time, so how much had he known?
No. That wasn’t a problem of physics or quantum mechanics or whatever you wanted to call it. That was Albert Einstein misreading Joe Steele. Einstein had been mighty good with a slide rule. With people? Not so hot. With Joe Steele, you got only one mistake. Einstein made a big one, and paid a big price.
What went through Charlie’s mind was I’m still here. Einstein had done more while he was around. Charlie knew that. But Einstein was a genius, and Charlie didn’t fill the bill there. He knew that, too. Genius or not, he was still around to do the things he could do, while Einstein wasn’t. That also counted. As far as Charlie could see, it counted for more than anything else.
* * *
Mike sat in the ruins of Yamashita, on the east coast of North Japan, as the sun went down. Red propaganda posters still decorated the walls and fences that the fighting hadn’t knocked down. Workers and peasants marched side by side into a sunny future. Happy tractors-they were smiling cartoons-plowed fields. He couldn’t read the script, but the pictures spoke for themselves.
He spooned beef stew out of a C-ration can. It wasn’t one of his favorites, but it beat hell out of going hungry. Down in South Japan, they were trying to make the Japs use the Roman alphabet all the time. The idea was to link them to the wider world. Whether they wanted to be linked that way. . Eisenhower didn’t bother to ask. He just followed Joe Steele’s orders.
Trotsky was supposed to be the one who tore everything up by the roots. But the Russians hadn’t tried to change the way people in North Japan wrote. What did it say when Joe Steele was more radical than Mr. World Revolution?
A soldier came over to Mike and asked, “Hey, Sarge, are we gonna move up toward Sendai tonight?”
Sendai was the next real city, about ten miles north of Yamashita. It held about a quarter of a million people. It was also the place where the North Japanese were digging in for a serious stand. All the same, Mike shook his head. “Doesn’t look that way, Ralph. Our orders are to sit tight right where we are.”
“How come?” Ralph said. “If we hit ’em when they’re off-balance, like, maybe we can punch through ’em an’ get this goddamn stupid useless fucking war over with.”
Mike chuckled. “Tell me again how you feel about it. I wasn’t quite sure the first time.” He held up a hand. “Seriously, though, all I do is work here. You want to get the orders changed, go back to Division HQ. That’s where they came from.”
“Oh, yeah. They’re gonna listen to a PFC.” Ralph patted his single stripe. “But I still say we’re missin’ a good chance.”
“I think so, too, but I can’t do anything about it, either. Maybe we’ll bomb ’em tonight or something.” Mike paused to slap at a mosquito. There weren’t nearly so many of them now in August as there had been during spring, but Japan seemed to be without them only when it was snowing.
Ralph slapped, too. “What we ought do is bomb this place with that new shit, that DDT,” he said. “Beats the bejesus out of Flit and like that. I mean, it really kills the little sonsabitches.”
“Yeah.” Mike wasn’t lousy. He didn’t have fleas. He got sprayed every week or two, and the pests couldn’t live on him. “It’s the McCoy, all right.”
He walked around his section’s perimeters, making sure the sentries were where they needed to be and stayed on their toes. The main North Japanese force was up at Sendai, sure. But those bastards liked to sneak men in civilian clothes, sometimes even women, back into areas they’d lost and have them toss grenades at the Americans and try to disappear in the confusion afterwards. Whenever you fought Japs, you needed to stay ready all the time or you’d be sorry.
About half past ten, Mike was getting ready to roll himself in his blanket. He’d learned to sleep anywhere at any time in the labor encampment. That came in handy for a soldier, too.
Before he dropped off, though, bombers droned overhead, flying from south to north. They really were going to hit Sendai, then. They hadn’t used the B-29s all that much lately, even at night. North Japanese fighters and flak made the big planes suffer.
The ones tonight were flying so high, he could hardly hear their engines. Considering how much noise B-29s made in the air, that was really saying something. The North Japanese in Sendai knew they were coming, though. Their antiaircraft guns sent a fireworks display of tracers into the sky. Mike hoped the crews would come through safe.
He twisted in his hole. Like a dog or a cat, he looked for the most comfortable way in which to sleep. He’d just found it and closed his eyes when a new sun blazed in the north.