Read Online Alternate Gerrolds by David Gerrold - Free Book Online Page A

dollar, flipped it, and caught it on the back of my wrist. I lifted my hand away to show him. “Uh—ah—it looks like Paris,” I said. I glanced at the compass. “Uh, you wanna come right about—ah, forty degrees, skipper.”
    This was part of the security around this operation. Once we were in the air, not even the ground stations were supposed to know where we were. We had been instructed to plot three separate courses to the target; we were forbidden to choose our final heading until we were out over the channel, away from all possible ground observers. Of course, all the flight crews knew that there were U-boats in the channel, tracking the comings and goings of all flights, but we didn’t worry about it. Much. Colonel Peck and I favored two different courses, Amsterdam and Paris, each named for the city we’d head toward before turning toward Berlin.
    Our group had been sending single flights out over the continent for months, spotting troop movements, checking weather conditions, dropping
leaflets, taking photos, surveying bomb damage, all that stuff—a lot more flights than we needed to. They were decoys to get the jerries used to the sight of a single Allied plane crossing their skies. Some of the fellows resented the duty. They’d rather have been dropping bombs, and nobody would tell them why their flights were so important, but they were.
    We’d flownaalot of the flights too, mostly the missions over Berlin and our secondary targets. In the past week, we’d even made two leaflet drops, dropping the package and then pulling up and away sharply to the right exactly as we would do later today. The leaflets had warned the Berliners to leave the city, because we were going to destroy it. We implied that we’d be sending a thousand planes across the channel, darkening their skies with the roar of engines and the thunder of bombs. We’d heard they were installing ack-ack guns from here to the Rhine and we wondered if they’d test them on us today.
    Once, we’d also dropped an agent into Germany. A fellow named Flynn. His job was to contact members of the underground and warn them to get out of Berlin before the sixth. I wondered where he was now. I hoped he had gotten out. A nice fellow, I guess, but I wouldn’t have his job. He’d seemed foolhardy to me.
    Colonel Peck glanced at the altimeter, tapped it to make sure it wasn’t stuck, and then spoke into his microphone. “All right, Stan, Ollie. We’re at cruising altitude. You can start arming the device.” He waited for their confirmations, then switched off again.
    We’d heard that the Nazis had forbidden the civilian population to flee Berlin, but our intelligence sources were telling us that at least a third of the civilians had evacuated anyway and more were streaming out every day. Even if the bomb failed, we would still have seriously disrupted the economy of the Reich’s capital. Most of the overlords of the Reich had already moved themselves away from the city—except for that pompous turnip, Goering. He had publicly boasted that not a single allied bomb would fall on Berlin. I wondered if he would be in Berlin today. I wondered about all the others too. Goebbels, Heydrich, Eichmann, Hess, Himmler, and the loudmouthed little paper-hanger. Would they be close enough to see the blast? What would they think? What would they do?
    Some of the psych boys said that they believed that Corporal Shickelgruber would sooner die in the holy flames of martyrdom than ever let
himself be captured and put on trial for war crimes. Worse, he would take the nation down with him.
    If the bomb worked—
    Of course it worked. We’d seen it work in Nevada. I couldn’t get it out of my head—that terrible mushroom cloud climbing into the morning sky, churning and rising and burning within. It was a preview of Hell. Afterward, we were given the chance to withdraw from the mission. None of us did. Perhaps if we hadn’t already been a crew, some of us would