The course, he meant, to the enemy.
The major had set plenty of cities on fire in his time. His brief time; he was twenty-six. Twenty-six years old and he'd flown courses that had burned out, smothered, smashed, and otherwise eliminated something on the order (he figured, being a man of mathematical bent) of three billion hours of human life. Expunged on that milk run. (You take the average life expectancy in enemy cities, multiply by days in a year and hours in a day, and multiply that by two further factors: average fatalities in a raid and number of raids led by Major Waite. Three billion man-woman-child hours, conservatively).
Colonel Calm glanced at Mr. Learned, the lone journalist permitted to go along—to write the eyewitness account. Mr. Learned sat on a parachute, his spectacles aslant, his hair awry, lost sleep whitewashed on his sharp countenance. His knees made a desk for an aluminum hospital chart board and on this, on yellow paper, using a pencil of a soft sort with which his pockets bulged, he scribbled. Once, he hitched at the collar of his unfamiliar uniform. A moment later, he glanced up. He smiled.
Colonel Calm nodded and scrambled into the tunnel that ran to the rear of his ship.
It was a journey he detested.
The passageway—a straight, metal intestine lined with cloth—traversed the bomb bay and was of a diameter sufficient to contain one crawling man. If a pressurized B-29 were hit badly—or if it blew a blister—a man in the tunnel would be rammed through it by compressed air like a projectile and hurled against a bulkhead—head first, or feet first—at the speed of a hundred and sixty miles an hour.
The colonel crawled—gnawed by claustrophobia. He pushed his chute ahead in the dim tube—because that was regulations. He wished he had chosen to drag it, instead. The thing stuck. He lunged up over it and his ribs came in contact with the curved top of the tunnel. He was half-jammed there. Sweat broke out on him—he tried to breathe—his ribs hurt. He could yell—they could get a rope around his foot and haul him back. He inched clear of the chute—pushed it forward, and went on more slowly, struggling now with the afreets of panic—putting them down like mutineers, savagely.
Now he thought of the bomb bay—the oblong maw atop which he fought his way. Big as a freight car. Big as two garages set end to end. Big enough to hold—how many horses? A dozen? And what did it contain?
His sweat dried up. His skin pimpled. Coldness seemed to flush the tube as coldness flushes a belly into which ice water has been gulped. Was the air here invisibly alive? Did uranium exude invisible, lethal rays—like radium? Or did it lie inert—in uncritical masses of unknown sizes (but not big)—waiting for union?
He went on.