THE STORM

The shot was set for four. I had that from three men who each had it from a fourth, which at base camp passed for confirmation, and by midnight the whole place had arranged itself around the hour the way a household arranges itself around a deathbed — no one sleeping, nothing to do, every man finding some small chore to be seen at. Cobb had dealt out the ground days before: face down, feet toward the thing, eyes shut, a square of welder's glass issued apiece as though we were being sent out to mend fence. My own mark was eleven paces from the mess-hall wall, stepped off the evening before, and the crate of rehearsal returns stood picked out at the end of the porch where the recording detachment had stacked it, and at midnight I still intended nothing grander than to be modestly misplaced when it went. Flat in some slightly wrong spot with other men's paperwork under me — a man carrying a ladder through a riot is a workman, and a man carrying nothing is a rioter.

A little after one the sky took a hand. It came out of the south with the wind ahead of it, then lightning walking along the ridges, then rain going through the tents like gossip through a parish. That desert hadn't been wet since spring, and it chose that night. Men who had been lying on their assigned dirt sat up in their blankets, and inside ten minutes the camp had three facts where it had had one.

"It's scrubbed," said a machinist near me, wringing out his hat. "Off till tomorrow night. You can't fire in this."

"It goes at four regardless," said another man. "The batteries won't keep. Four or never."

"They moved it to daylight," said a third, "so the doctors can photograph it."

"Nobody told you it was off," said Cobb, from the dark behind all of us.

"Nobody's told us anything, Sergeant."

"Then it's on."

That was the whole of the night's official information, and we got it again about hourly, always the same. The professors stood around the mess like relatives at a will-reading; two of the Hungarians argued in Hungarian in the doorway, which sounded no worse wet than dry; and twice the loudspeaker crackled alive and said nothing — the cruelest thing a loudspeaker can do to five hundred waiting men.¹

I drifted up toward the ranch house about three, on the sound principle that whatever the brass decided, I wanted to hear it before it was decided for me. They had the dry, of course — the brass were the only men on the range that night whose assigned ground was indoors. The General filled the doorway the way wet sand fills a boot, and past him, through the screen, the weather officer — a young Californian who had learned the sky at college and consulted his instruments the way a widow consults a planchette board — stood at a map he had plainly begun to hate.

"You will give me the hour this breaks," the General was saying, "and it will be the right hour."

"It's a local storm, sir. Thermal. It dies toward dawn — between five and six you'll have your window."

"If I don't," said the General, "I am going to hang you." And I could not tell you to this day whether that was a joke; nor, by his face, could the weatherman.² I remember thinking it was the soundest use anyone had proposed for that rank all war.

The Director took no part in any of it that I saw. He stood at the window with a cigarette, as he had stood at windows with cigarettes for weeks; by that night he had smoked himself down to a hat and a cough, and you could have read the weather map through him.

Deems found me back at the porch. He had his manifests buttoned inside his shirt and the look of a man whose church was flooding.

"If this wind holds southerly they'll scrub," he said. "The paper says scrub. Nine hundred yards of cable strung forward and the paper says scrub." Then he caught sight of the crate at the end of the porch. "Klipspringer — those returns. If the rain works into that crate, get it under cover. A wet return is no return."

I told him I would see to it personally, and for once in my life I meant every word.

Marcum was somewhere out ahead of us with the south crew, miles nearer the tower than any man ought to be to anything, in the same rain. I had his letter to his mother in Joplin buttoned into my breast pocket — hold it till after, he'd said, and I had promised to hand it back Tuesday — and where his crew lay, he'd told me, grinning, we'll feel the heat of her on our necks. In daylight that had been Missouri brag. At three in the morning, in the rain, I kept feeling the sentence on my own neck, which was ten miles from anything and had no business feeling it.

Now here is the part I would leave out if I meant this account to flatter me, and since I don't, in it goes. Through the dry weeks I had priced the Italian's famous book — the air catching, the sky lighting, the whole works — and priced it flat, the way I'd price a horse. The only book that cannot lose, I had called it, there being no result in which the winner collects, and I had admired the shape of it as one professional admires another, and slept well. But I had done that pricing at noon, with coffee in me and the sky behaving. At four in the morning, wet through, with lightning stepping down the valley toward a tower I couldn't see and the thing sitting on top of it, the price would not hold. I found myself doing sums with no numbers in them. The professors had been wrong about rain that very night — plain rain, their own home weather, wrong by hours in front of generals — and if they could miss by that much on water falling out of the sky, my whole authority for saying they had the other thing right came down to its having suited me to say so. My nose was no help; it is no instrument for a disaster that keeps a printed schedule. And underneath all of it, in the dark, the fear I had sold short at noon wanted paying. Nobody had told me what lightning did if it found that tower. By the faces at the ranch house, nobody had told them either.

Some time before five the loudspeaker came up again with a voice on it, very level, the way you talk to a horse you expect trouble from. The shot would go at five-thirty. The count would resume at minus twenty minutes. All personnel to their assigned positions. The count went out by shortwave as well, and under the voice, bled in from some other frequency by nobody's design, came music — dance music, of all the commodities in the world.³

And the rain was slackening — stars in the south, the storm dying on the weatherman's exact schedule, and none of it put a nickel back into my noon confidence. Five hundred men moved around me in the dark toward their squares of dirt, and I knew I could not lie down on mine with my eyes shut and take what came. Eleven paces from the wall was no longer slightly wrong enough. Nowhere in that camp was.

The crate came up heavier than it had any right to, wet at one corner, and I walked, not ran, down past the generators toward the motor pool. Lieutenant's orders, records to the rear: I had the sentence ready, and Deems had all but countersigned it on the porch.

Sixty yards along, Cobb came out of the dark at me the way he did — all at once, from no particular direction.

"Your ground's behind you, Mr. Klipspringer."

"Lieutenant Deems's returns," I said, and let the last of the rain gutter off my brim onto the lid, official as a notary. "I'm getting this paper under cover before it's pulp."

He looked at the crate, then at my heading, which was not the direction of any cover known to that camp. "Record tent's east."

"In this dark, Sergeant, everything's east."

He let that sit as long as it deserved, which was a while. "Flare goes up, you go flat where you stand," he said, and stepped off on whatever rounds a man like that keeps while the sky is argued over by his betters.

The motor pool was a corporal under a dripping tarpaulin with a clipboard and a lantern.

"Records," I said. "Lieutenant Deems's detachment. This has to be in the rear before the shot goes."

"Ticket."

"He'll countersign after. There wasn't time to—"

"Ticket first, countersign second," said the corporal, not looking up. "And it don't signify anyhow, because nothing rolls till after. Sergeant's got every distributor cap in this yard in a coffee can under his cot. I had a full colonel in here at midnight wanting a carryall on his say-so. He's walking too. You want to argue, argue with the can."

"Corporal, in a quarter of an hour—"

"In a quarter of an hour you're supposed to be face down on your mark, mister, and so am I." He turned the lantern down as if that settled it, and it did.⁴

I won't dress what happened next up as a plan, because the plan had died at the coffee can. There was the fence west of the yard, open dark past it, and I stood in the rain-smell doing the arithmetic of a man on foot in bare desert against a thing ten miles off — and while I stood there the voice said minus five minutes, and a siren went somewhere, and a green flare came up over the camp and hung.

Under the flare the whole camp turned strange. Buildings I had walked past for weeks stood at wrong angles; a searchlight was working the guard posts; the voice came off the wet ground itself. I started back the way I had come, and inside forty paces I no longer knew which way I had come. Face down, feet toward the thing, Cobb had said, and I could not for my life have told you where the thing was. The welder's glass was in my shirt pocket doing nobody any good. Somewhere south Marcum was on his belly grinning at the heat to come, and Deems lay on his manifests, and the General had his window and, pending results, his weatherman unhanged.

The voice said minus two minutes.

I was in the open between the cook-shack and nothing at all, and I quit pretending I was going anywhere. I set the crate down in the wet dirt and got down flat across it, arms up over the back of my neck, face in other men's paperwork, Marcum's letter pressed flat between my chest and the lid. Eleven paces from my mark — eleven hundred, for anything I could have sworn to. The voice went on taking the numbers away, and I lay on the box in the open, feet toward I could not tell you what, and waited for it on the back of my neck.