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 Aloi 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’ 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 a half 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.” 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 vulnerable, 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.