Departure 37, p.15
Departure 37, page 15
“I loved climbing trees,” she said with a nostalgic sigh. “Broke my ankle falling out of one when I was nine. You know what I did then?”
“Stopped climbing trees.”
She turned to him, smiling. “Learned how to climb with a cast on my foot.”
She leaned against the high windowsill, her back to the city. The curtains were open, and the windows looked out across the tree-lined streets that bordered the campus.
“Your drink?” She lifted it but held it close, making him come to her. He could smell her perfume, something floral and perfectly faint, the kind of teasing Is it even there? scent that made you want to lean in.
“Jimmy from Cleveland,” she said. “I liked that one. You come across as a humorless man at first, but that’s not the truth.”
Marty said, “Who do you work for?”
“The United States, same as you. You should ask what I want. That’s the question that matters.”
“Okay. What do you want?”
“To know how it’s done, for starters.”
“How what is done?”
“How you make airplanes disappear.”
Her voice was so loud that he cringed. She looked from side to side, faux surreptitious, then stage-whispered, “How you make airplanes disappear.”
“We’re about to begin repeating ourselves,” he said. “And I won’t—”
“No we’re not. We’re moving right along.” She sipped her drink. “The Telstar 1 satellite is down. It will be announced soon, but nobody will say the truth: our own atomic tests in the Pacific fried it.”
“You’re some newspaper reporter,” Marty said wryly.
“Oh, relax. That wasn’t all a lie. I have written a few articles. They were specials for the Oak Ridger.”
Oak Ridge. Of course.
She sat down on the small settee by the window and patted the cushion beside her.
“Let me tell you my real story. Then you can decide whether you want to run away or have me arrested—or both.”
He meant to say no. He really did.
But he sat down beside her.
* * *
What Marilyn Metzger had wanted, always, was access to secrets.
“It turned out to be fortunate,” she told Marty, “that Robert and I hadn’t gotten married yet. I think, with his name, I never would have been granted my first job in the Department of Defense. But, lucky for us, all he’d left me with was a kiss and a promise. Not even a ring.”
When she arrived in Washington, D.C., she had $32 in a checking account and a list of jobs that she believed would require security clearance.
“Typist or secretary positions,” she said. “Except for the janitor spots. I applied for three of those. I really liked the idea of having keys.”
The janitorial work had been given to men, and Marilyn Metzger, who disclosed nothing of her missing fiancé in the interviews, was hired as a phone operator for the Navy’s procurement division. She did good work. Two years later she won a job at the Pentagon, the massive five-sided military administration building on which construction had begun on September 11, 1941. By the time Marilyn entered the building, it was home to the Department of Defense, a brand-new organizational merger of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. She intended to stay there for as long as it took.
“As long as what took?” Marty asked when she told him that.
“To learn the truth of Flight 19.”
A car passed on the street, and she took the opportunity to look away from him, gazing out the window behind her. She was sitting on a blush-colored settee with her legs crossed.
“Now I am the personal secretary of a United States admiral,” she said. “Do you want to guess which one?”
He strived to look indifferent.
“Admiral Ralph H. Cutting,” she said.
Marty nodded, then finished his scotch. Run, his brain told him, but he didn’t move.
“There’s more in the bottle,” Marilyn Metzger said, watching him.
“It can stay there.”
“You sure? You look a little peaked.”
“I’m sure.”
“Are my bona fides convincing enough for you?” she asked. “Or do you need more? Jimmy should’ve spoken for me, no?”
For some reason, her teasing tone incensed him.
“There wasn’t much to giggle about, watching Jimmy today,” he snapped.
“He didn’t make it?” She seemed shocked, and Marty felt a ridiculous burst of pride, a sense of She trusts my work even though he didn’t understand his current work any better than he understood this woman.
“He made it.”
He hadn’t wanted the whiskey but found himself pouring a stiff belt of it anyhow, thinking of the way the monkey had refused to accept his hand after the plane returned. Such a silly thing, and yet it lingered.
“Congratulations,” Marilyn said. “You’re changing the world.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Come on, Dr. Hazelton. Nothing will ever be the same. That must mean something to you, even though we’re just arrogant stardust.”
Marty lowered his glass. Frowned. That phrase… it was something he’d often thought but never said, or at least never said aloud, except for maybe one time—one time that taught him better.
Then he got it. With the memory came a better understanding of her.
“You read Cutting’s notes from Offutt,” he said.
Offutt Air Force Base was in Nebraska, headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, the nerve center of the American nuclear triad, and in December of 1960 Marty had been one of a few dozen people who’d been convened in a bunker complex there to listen while the nation’s highest-ranking military leaders walked through the likely results of a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. They’d sat on wooden folding chairs in front of a cement wall, several stories high, and watched as giant maps were unfurled with solemn ceremony, and then one speaker after another climbed the scaffolding to point out various targets and explain the death tolls associated with each one. It was a singularly grim day, one that made Pearl Harbor feel like the Fourth of July. The topic was nothing less than the end of civilization.
A plan for it.
Marty had not been asked to speak. Later, after the formal sessions concluded, he met with a smaller group and answered a few questions about the winds, then was asked if he agreed with the casualty assessments and if he saw any room to mitigate the impact in, say, China, if a target in Russia were struck. Marty’s response was that he could quibble with some of the calculations but didn’t see the point.
Cutting pressed him on that, saying that, with the death toll in a nation that wasn’t even the direct target, the calculations damn well mattered. Marty’s response was clipped and measured.
“It would have mattered in 1951, Admiral.”
In 1951, they’d been armed “only” with atomic bombs—not thermonuclear bombs. For all the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those weapons were muskets compared to what had followed. The bombs that had killed tens of thousands had been replaced by bombs that would kill millions in a blink-fast, broiling flash. The United States now had more than 20,000 in a still-expanding arsenal, and a single one dropped on Moscow would leave 10 million dead. The Soviets could respond in kind. The Rubicon had been crossed.
We’re all a collection of the same thing that will destroy us, sir. Atoms. That’s human life, plant life, and it’s also the bomb. Nothing but stardust. We just happen to be the most arrogant stardust.
Marilyn Metzger seemed grimly pleased that he remembered.
“I didn’t just read the notes,” she said. “I was there. One of five women in the whole place. World ending is a man’s game. But Cutting wanted me there.”
“Why?”
“Because my memory is better than his, and he knew that no one was allowed to keep transcripts of what was shared in that bunker.”
True enough.
“That phrase: ‘arrogant stardust.’ It stuck with me. Because it was so… defeated.”
“It was hard to sit in that place and not feel some futility,” he said.
“I was there and I wanted to fight!”
“Fight for what? It won’t be victory. Deterrence demands the counter launch. Equal opportunity extermination.”
“Exactly,” she said. “The victory is in avoiding that. Imagine vanishing a plane and promising—really promising—that you could bring it back. Not next week, not next year, but a hundred years from now. What’s the limit, do you think? How far can you go?”
He wasn’t sure. He’d wondered about this a great deal.
“I can’t vanish a plane,” he said.
“Martin.” Chiding, the disappointed-teacher voice. “Imagine if America could say to the Soviets, ‘Go on, launch your missiles, but our leaders, the men you hate so much, won’t be here. They’ll have vanished, truly vanished, off to return at a time of their choosing.’ What do the Soviets do then?”
“Say, ‘Nice try,’ and issue their launch codes. Because you’re presupposing a personal goal, leader versus leader, assassination rather than annihilation. The nuclear game is beyond that.”
“You’re wrong. Mad kings with rivals? There’s nothing more personal. Each country has plans for leadership, some fractional percentage of the population who survive and rebuild.”
“And that’s a laugh,” Marty said. “It’ll take a thousand years for the soil and water to purge our poison when an all-out nuclear war is done, and whatever society emerges won’t remember what ours looked like. Or care.”
“Why don’t you care, damn it! Care before that happens!”
He was surprised by the sudden venom in her voice. Her body had gone rigid, the muscles in her neck taut, her up-thrust chin trembling ever so faintly with righteous rage.
“I care,” Marty said. “But I don’t make the rules.”
She burst off the settee and paced the hotel room, bristling with anger.
“I’m so sick of academic discussion around the end of the world! Planes disappear, cities are flattened, nations build bunkers, and you little men in your little laboratories lift your hands and say, ‘It wasn’t me.’ Don’t any of you feel anything?”
He didn’t answer. What was the point?
For a long moment there was silence while she stood there glaring at him and he sat, waiting her out. When she suddenly crossed the room in three swift strides, he was utterly unprepared, and when she slapped him across the face, he never so much as lifted a hand in defense. The blow rocked him good, stunned him.
“Did you feel that?” she hissed.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you, I did.”
When she reached for him again, he tensed, expecting another blow. Instead, she gripped the back of his head and pulled his face to hers and kissed him, her lips soft and warm, a flick of her tongue gliding between his own lips, quick as a snakebite. Then she shoved him away and stepped back.
“What about that?”
He stared at her, speechless, the sting of her slap on his cheek obliterated by the touch of her mouth on his, that grazing tip of her tongue.
“Arrogant stardust,” she said. “That’s all the human race is to you. Yet we fight and we fuck.”
He winced a little at the ugly word, and she seemed pleased by his reaction.
“Explain it to me,” she said. “How all animals behave that way; we just evolved a little faster. No magic to it, just math.”
Marty reached up and rubbed his cheek. The slap would leave a bruise. He hadn’t intended to touch his cheek, though; he’d wanted to touch his lips.
“Have you ever been in love?” Marilyn asked.
He hesitated, then shook his head. “No. Not truly.”
“I was afraid of that. I don’t think a man who has never been in love can save the world. Ever wanted a child?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I think we’re rushing toward the bottom of the funnel, and what would be the point in bringing a child into the world at that moment?”
He was braced for her next onslaught, be it physical or verbal, but she softened and, he thought, maybe even nodded.
“You’ve found something sacred; don’t you understand that?” she said, voice scarcely above a whisper. “I don’t need you to admit it, but I’ve seen the files. What you can do with those planes—it’s supernatural, almost, a phenomenon that can’t be explained—”
“I’ll explain it,” he said despite himself.
“Why do you need to?”
He blinked, bewildered. “Because I don’t understand it yet.”
She laughed a cold laugh again. “Why do you think we’re here?”
“Who? The two of us?”
“All of us! Do you really see no higher?”
“You’re talking about God?” he asked, uncertain, and she put her face into her hands, exasperated. He stared at her and thought of the monkey refusing to touch his hand. She whirled from him, stalked across the room to the bed, and plucked a paperback book from the nightstand. Vonnegut again.
“If you need to explain something so badly,” she said, pulling a picture free from the pages, “then explain this!”
It was a black-and-white photograph of a Japanese child—boy or girl was impossible to tell because so little was left of their hair or flesh—reaching out from beneath a pile of stone rubble. Hiroshima, after the first bomb fell, or maybe Nagasaki, after the second.
“This,” Marilyn Metzger said, “is what happens when we solve for X. How much more powerful is the hydrogen bomb than what we used here?”
“Roughly a thousand times,” Marty managed, his throat dry. “The bomb we dropped on Hiroshima was a stick of dynamite compared to what we have now.”
She returned the photograph to the pages of the Vonnegut paperback with the gentlest of touches, like someone handling an ancient treasure map.
“We flattened two cities, ended a war, and imperiled the world. And now we race the Soviets for superiority. I love that word. The space race, the arms race, everything a contest, which implies what?”
“Someone wins.”
“No,” she said. “It just implies that it has an end.”
She was standing close to him now and the light was low and he wasn’t sure if there were tears in her eyes or if that was merely the dark, dancing reflected light. He couldn’t bring himself to leave the room. He could be court-martialed for this conversation, and still… he wanted to be with her. It had been so long since he’d had someone to talk with—really talk.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“To go on the plane. When you test it.”
He said nothing.
“The human test is coming,” she said. “And I will be there. When the time comes, make the argument for using me, all right? That’s all I ask.”
Again he offered no response. They faced each other, standing beside her bed in the dim light.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” she said.
“It’s fine.”
“I’m not as sorry I kissed you.”
His throat made an audible click when he swallowed.
“I wanted to see you feel something,” she said. “I still do.”
He wanted to reach for her. He wanted to run from her. Which to do?
In the end, he didn’t make the decision. She came to him, and when she kissed him the second time, her tongue parted his lips fully, and the taste of her was no longer a trace but full and glorious. They kissed, swaying beside the bed, lips together but bodies still inches apart, and he couldn’t bear that any longer, so he slipped his hand in her hair and cupped the back of her head and pulled her to him, chest to chest, feeling the heat of her all along him like a current.
When she reached behind her, he thought she meant to remove his hand, so he released her and stepped back, flustered. She hadn’t been swatting his hand away, though. She’d been reaching for the zipper of her dress. When she slipped out of it and stood before him, wearing only the bra and panties, he felt a shiver that seemed to come from within him, and she saw it, smiled, and took his hand.
“Feel something,” she whispered as she pulled him down onto the bed.
And he would. Of course he would. But every time he’d been with a woman, even while in the throes of the physical pleasure, he simply couldn’t seem to get all the way out of his own head. It was one of the things he hated about himself, and as he lowered his mouth to her breast and slid her underwear down her thighs, aching with lust, he was afraid it would be the same with her: that the missing fraction of him that always hovered above, an observer, distanced and alone, would remain. Even when he climaxed, he would think of choices and risks or, worse, of dying stars and pointless days, that funnel of despair.
Instead, his mind emptied as he slipped within her. He felt only her warmth, and it washed the world away, and a greater gift he’d never known.
ASH POINT, MAINE OCTOBER 25, 2025
Time seemed to slow once Abe was gone and Charlie and Lawrence were alone.
She sat at the bar, mindlessly checking her phone, unable to keep from trying. Lawrence paced the front windows, his grandfather’s gun in hand.
“This is driving me crazy,” Charlie said.
“It’s only been twenty minutes.”
“It feels like forever!”
He didn’t argue.
She opened her texts, saw the undelivered I love you messages waiting for her father. Would they ever go through? He didn’t need to read them to know that she loved him. He knew. Right?
She closed the message app and opened the camera. Everything worked except for communication—or escape from Ash Point. It was as if someone had targeted those precise functions and removed them. Disable the car, the ATV, the internet, and the cell signal. Why? And how?
“The camera works,” she said aloud, just to say something, because Lawrence’s silent pacing was stressing her out.
“Terrific,” he said. “When my grandpa comes back, keep him out of your damn videos, all right?”
