Gods Without Men Read Free Page A

the fly by a team working out of a hangar at the Cairo airfield.
    The B-29s limped on; Schmidt went with them. Cockpit temperatures climbed to a hundred and seventy, then fell to minus twenty over the Himalayas as the airframes were tested almost to destruction by violent downdrafts and side winds that threw the giant planes around like balsawood toys. He peered through the clouds and caught glimpses of valleys and gorges, rivers, villages, every so often the bright unnerving gleam of aluminum wreckage on the black mountainsides. Something protected him, and a week after flying over the hump he was standing on the tarmac at Hsinching. Peasants straightened up from their paddies at the airfield’s edge, shielding their eyes to watch ninety bombers of the 58th Wing take off on their way to the Showa steelworks in Anshan. He was almost hallucinating with tiredness, having spent the previous forty-eight hours field-modding the big Wright Cyclone engines, trying to stop the cascade of horrors that unfolded when things went wrong in midair: valve heads flying off and chewing up the cylinders, tiny leaks of hydraulic fluid that could prevent the pilot from feathering a stalled prop, so that it started to drag and then sheared off, or worse, seized up the whole engine, which then twisted right out of the wing. The planes looked like huge white birds, like angels. He felt a sort of queasy elation. He was atoning; he was helping win the war.
    In early ’45 they moved forward operations to the Mariana Islands. On Guam, Schmidt spent his breaks sitting in a deck chair by the enlisted men’s mess at North Field, reading
Isis Unveiled
in an edition he’d bought from a Theosophical bookshop in Calcutta. Beyond the perimeter, out in the jungle, were wild animals and half-feral Japanese who’d been stranded when the Imperial Army evacuated. He, on the other hand, was out in the open, in the clear. For the first time in years he allowed himself to feel happy. He heard from aircrew about the incendiary raids, and somehow that didn’t touch him, but then he was transferred to Tinian. The 509th Composite acted like they were the second coming, strutting around as if they owned the whole Pacific and everyone else ought to pay them for the privilege of using it. Rumor was they were testing some new superweapon; as he watched the
Enola Gay
take off forHiroshima, Schmidt knew it wasn’t carrying the standard payload, but that was all. Like the rest of the world, he found out through pictures: the burned children, the watches stopped at 8:15. His beautiful gleaming aircraft, the harbingers of light, had been used to unleash darkness. He’d been betrayed.
    By the fall of ’46 he was back in Seattle but couldn’t settle into the routine of civilian work. The world seemed to be sliding toward some terrible new evil. The spiritual promise of energy had been perverted: Instead of abolishing poverty and hunger, atomic power would turn the planet into a wasteland. Unable to face going outside, he began to neglect his work. The bungalow was cold and damp. In the evenings he sat in front of the fire and shivered until he fell asleep, imagining the tall conifers outside the window closing in and blotting out the sky.
    He quit before they could fire him, withdrew his savings from the bank, packed his library and his papers into his ’38 Ford pickup and headed for the desert. In his mind he saw himself as one of the prophets of old, an ascetic sitting cross-legged in a cave. He would mortify his body, purify his mind. The world had split in two, either side of the Iron Curtain. He would heal the wound. His intention was to summon the only force powerful enough to transcend Communism and Capitalism and halt the cascade of destructive energies. Since the dawn of history there had been contact with extraterrestrial intelligences. Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels, the Mayan space pilots, the cosmic weaponry of Vedic India—the visitors possessed a