The man shrugged. "Pretty high up, I'll admit." He began unbuttoning his coveralls.
The colonel wished the man would stop looking so directly at him. Powerful eyes—like a lot of those scientific birds. They could, with a glance, give you an impotent sensation—a feeling that you weren't in command at all. A feeling that they commanded a force which could outlast you and would defeat you in the end. They made you feel—Christ bite them!—like a tin soldier, sometimes. And yet—high up. VIP. This was a trick mission—the trickiest of the war. You couldn't afford to make a fool of yourself. "Never mind," the colonel said. "My major probably checked you in—and forgot to mention it. The strain—"
"I know your major, yes. Sad."
"Sad? Greatest flying officer who ever took a plane off a base!"
"Cold-blooded."
"Right! Veins full of liquid helium. Have to be!"
"Have to be? Perhaps. I always hesitated—though—to think of men as numbers."
The colonel felt relieved. Major Waite's discussion of flight plans—his harangues in the briefing rooms—sometimes left the colonel a little chilled. Emptied-out. Obviously this Chris knew the major. He wasn't—fantastically—impossibly—an agent of the enemy. Now the colonel gestured toward the bomb bay—the radioactive uterus of the plane. "You—helped put it together?"
The man seemed to grow pale. His smile disappeared. "No."
"Then what—? In God's name what—?"