Gods Without Men Read Free

the dictionary of fools
, which was a quotation, his first, the second being
If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you
, a saying he picked out of an old copy of
Reader’s Digest
and which gave him the notion, foreign to him until that time, that you could find truth in the written word. Thereafter he made a habit of seeking out such written truths and copying them down, first on scraps of paper, then in notebooks, until finally he realized he was working toward a system, such an understanding of the world as very few possessed. He read as much as he could, devoured books in every spare minute of his day, and never again touched liquor until Davis persuaded him into it, and only then out of some momentary wish to be like other people, a right he knew deep down he’d forfeited.
    Davis listened to his story without saying a word. It was several weeks before he visited again.
    Schmidt busied himself with signaling and watching the sky, plowing the furrow he’d started with those few scattered quotations. His search had led him first to the Bible, and then other books. He always suspected that any valuable truth would be hidden, that unless you had to dig for a thing, it wasn’t worth possessing. A year or two passed, and he’d found himself in Seattle, pushing a mop around the inside of a T-hangar as engineers worked on aircraft whose size and complexity seemed like a miracle. Watching the great machines take off and land, the way the Earth relinquished them and gently welcomed them back, he felt thathere was the secret made manifest. He decided to become a pilot, but when he went for a sight test, they told him he was astigmatic. That route was closed.
    He went to the office and asked how to get a job as an aircraft mechanic. Technical school, replied the manager, and soon Schmidt was taking classes during the day and working nights as a security guard. By the time the war in Europe started, he had a steady job at Boeing Field and a bungalow full of books, their margins blackened by his spidery writing. The shape of his project was becoming clear: how to connect the mysteries of technology with those of the spirit. He knew the aircraft he worked on—with their tangled skeins of electrical cable, their hydraulics, their finely calibrated gauges that monitored fuel levels and engine power—were only half the story. There were forces greater and more intangible than thrust and torque and lift. It had fallen to him to unify them. Perhaps when he was brought before his maker, he would be judged not as a monster but as a bringer of light, a good man.
    After Pearl Harbor he was reassigned to the XB-29 project, rushing out a new long-range bomber for use against the Japanese. The schedule was punishing. The aircraft had all kinds of problems, overheating engines, mysterious electrical faults that took days to trace. One day a test pilot lost control of a prototype, crashing through a power line into a nearby packing plant. The ground crew jumped into trucks and cars and drove toward the burning building, trying to get close enough to the wreckage to see if anyone could be saved. Thirty people died.
    The engine problems wouldn’t go away, and once the bomber went into production just about every part the plants churned out was defective. The generals wanted the planes in China to start operations, but on the date they were due to leave, not a single one was ready. Schmidt was posted to Wichita, working double shifts in a snowstorm, overseeing a crew performing final mods on the navigation system. They had to turn around every twenty minutes, because that was the longest anyone could stay outside before frostbite set in. At last the planes started flying east, only to be grounded in Egypt when the engines, which had more or less worked at freezing point, started malfunctioning in the hundred-and-twenty-degree heat. Schmidt was sent out to retrofit new bafflesand a cooling system, designed more or less on