It was queer. There was a war on and you were bustling around. They sent you on strange trips because you were a specialist. Then you crashed, and when they finally got you out of Tibet it was nineteen forty-six and the war was over and the big installations were deserted and the aircraft were gone and the East was drifting back into its usual dim variety of slow death.
I had lots of time to think on that slow trip back. They put me on a slow boat because they thought I’d mend better.
I soaked up the sun and remembered.
The crew chief had stuck his head through the door and told us to strap on the belts. It was the hump trip, early ’45. I rubbed the glass clear, and it scared me to look at the ice growing on the wings of the old crate. It was one of the few night trips that the China National Airways Corporation ever made. Those kids liked to take it on the bright days with just enough cloud to duck into one if necessary. The old Allergic to Combat had to fly it in any weather at any minute on the clock.
The motors had been churning away when we hit. I knew we hit, and that was all. A grinding continuing crash and I knew I was torn loose from the strap and was being hurled toward the opposite side of the plane. Then nothing.
When I came to, the sky was gray with dawn and the brown rocks stuck up out of the snow. The wind of the Himalayas needled the flying ice into my face. I hurt in a hundred places. The great plane lay silent and crumpled against the rocks. Snow had drifted high against the side of it. Bits of wing and tail surfaces were scattered around. I was cold. Almost too cold to stand. I tried to stand. My right ankle gave out, and I chipped my chin on a rock when I fell. I crawled around and felt the port motor. Cold. I crawled out of the wind and sat against the side of the ship and hugged my knees, waiting for it to get light enough to see.
They hadn’t had any luck. The pilot and co-pilot sat rigid and frozen in their seats, their heads at the same strange angle. The other two passengers had crushed skulls. I found the crew chief thirty feet from the plane, his blood frozen to one of the brown rocks.
I tried to build a fire outside and couldn’t. Then I tried to build it inside the plane. My hands were shaking too much. I spilled the little gas I had collected and the fire roared up. I had tried to haul the bodies out, but the fire was too fast and I was too weak. Besides, there was little point in it. I crawled through the hole in the side and sat in the snow and watched the whole thing blaze up. When it was half burned, the yellow sun climbed up and paled the flames. The sun was as cold as the snow.
I had warmed myself a little in the radiant heat of the burning plane. I had no food. I looked around at the weird wild hills. Blinding snow, though a hundred miles away white men were passing out from sunstroke. I imagined that it was some part of Tibet. That’s all I knew. I was so cold that I knew I’d have to move. We had hit on the side of a mountain. Only one way to go. Down the hill.
I died before I hit the bottom. That’s the way the doc told me to think about it. Stumbling and falling and rolling in the thin sharp air with my bare hands blue and my face numb. Feeling the slow, warming comfort, the driving desire for sleep, and remembering that you freeze to death that way. Crawling and rolling some more. The acid edges of the brown rock tearing my freezing flesh. I marveled stupidly at how little I bled. Then there wasn’t any more. Not until ’46.
A very solid little Britisher with a face like a wrinkled boot sat beside my hospital bed in Calcutta and told me how they got me out. That was before they found out who I was. News doesn’t travel very fast in the wild villages of the hills. He estimated that I had traveled about twelve miles. They must have found me at the edge of one of their trails across the high passes. They must have marveled and loaded me like a sack of grain across one of their shaggy ponies. Eventually they had heard in the outside world that there was a sick white man in one of the far villages.
I lay in the sun and remembered the fatuous nurse who had stood by the bed and tried to distract me while the doc changed bandages.
“My! You certainly’ll have a lot to tell about living in the wilds.”
I hadn’t bothered to argue with her. I could remember hot food being crammed into my mouth so I had to swallow it or strangle. I remembered the bitter smoke that hung in a small room and burned my eyes. Bulky people with wide heavy faces that grunted at me in strange tongues. Furs that stank. Somehow, they kept me alive.
Coming to life in the hospital was like being born again. My voice was dusty in my throat, and I couldn’t fit my mouth and tongue over the words. The white sheet on the bed had been the most wonderful thing in the world. I remembered running my left hand across it and noticing something odd about my hand.
I stared at my own hand for a long time, and my mind wouldn’t tell me what I had noticed. It didn’t look like my hand. It was thin, with the cords and bones showing clearly. Then I knew that the fingers were wrong. Not enough of them. The two on the end were gone, and the top of the middle one. But it wasn’t important. It was only important to feel the crisp soft texture of the sheet under my fingers. I know that I didn’t look to see how the other hand was.
It had been a time for sleeping. I know that I was mending then. Coming back from death. Growing into awareness and life. There was the day I realized that I was in a hospital.
I remembered the afternoon that the young doctor with the sharp face and the wise eyes sat beside the bed.
“Well, man from the hills, can you remember who you are yet?”
“Remember? Why not? Howard Garry. Captain. Engineers.”
“I’ve been asking you that question for three weeks.”
“I don’t remember you asking.”
“You seem pretty bright today, Garry. What was the date when you got lost in the hills?”
“Early April.”
“What year?”
“This year. Nineteen forty-five.”
“Sorry, Garry. This is nineteen forty-six. May. The war’s over. Most of your people have gone home.”
When I looked again, he was gone. I had to think it out. Thirteen months out of my life. The war was over. From that day on, I mended more rapidly.
I remember the nurse getting excited when I told her that there was nobody to notify. Just the War Department. No relatives, no wife, no children. I wanted to tell them to find Dan Christoff and tell him that I was okay. Then I realized that I could have more fun walking in on him.
They finally let me go in September. They loaded me on a boat. Howard Garry, back from the dead. Not quite all back. I usually run about one eighty. I was weighed out at one forty-two. Two and a fraction fingers missing. Top of the left ear gone. All the toes on the left foot gone. Fingers and toes were frozen. Slight limp. Big silver plate in my right ankle, replacing an area where infection had eaten away the bone. A big scar across my right cheek. And in each day there were long minutes when I couldn’t grasp where I was or what I was doing. Seconds of mental blindness. They told me that when the spells happened, I stood rigid and expressionless, staring straight ahead of me. Then the world would float slowly back.
I wanted to get back to the States and find Dan Christoff. We’ve always been as close as two citizens can get. Worked together, got drunk together, and had some beautiful battles.
I realized that I was one year older. Thirty-three. Dan would be thirty-four. We both worked as construction engineers for Saggerty and Hartshaw before the war. That’s the outfit that blankets the Midwest and grabs off more road stuff and bridge stuff than any other two you can name. They don’t do it so much by pressure as they do by sticking in very low bids on stiff penalty contracts. They have the equipment, and, as Dan and I always said, they hire the best brains.