The Way the Future Blogs

 

My time with the 456th Bomb Group was cut short when somebody at Air Force headquarters in Caserta, Italy, noticed that as a civilian I had been a writer and magazine editor, and immediately jerked me back to headquarters to write publicity for the weather squadron. None of what I did in that capacity, I promise you, did the slightest harm to the German Wehrmacht or the least imaginable good to the Allied — no, wait a minute. By gosh, I did do a little something for the ground-down enlisted men of the 12th Weather Squadron. See, they were getting screwed, and they didn’t even know it.

The 12th Weather Squadron was unusual among small military units in that it was split up into quite tiny groups, four or five officers and half a dozen enlisted men, or just enough to man a weather station for each bomb group. The people in these detachments seldom saw any of the two or three thousand other people in the squadron.

I received a copy of every promotion, so I could write a little news release about it to send to the promoted fellow’s hometown paper (who almost always threw it away). Meanwhile I had started a little, well, all right, it was pretty much a sort of fanzine — only for the B-24 groups rather than sf fans — that was circulated to all the detachments. I encouraged each of the detachments to send me little stories about what they had been doing, even if no more than occasionally playing softball. I decided to make that more interesting, so I started printing news of promotions in every issue, officers in the left-hand facing page, enlisted men in the right. As I had expected, most months there would be a couple dozen officer promotions, few or none for enlisted men.

This caused some concern among the squadron’s higher authorities, who didn’t think it was good for morale, and they dealt with it by promoting me to the post of Squadron Historian, which carried with it a few privileges, including the right to rehouse myself in the squadron’s recreational hotel, the former Albergo Eremo or Hermit Hotel, halfway up the slope of our friendly local volcano, Mt. Vesuvius. So I took the bribe, turning all my news writing and fanzine publishing over to a corporal who, I think, soon stopped bothering with any of it.

As a resident of the Eremo, I had my own room with my own sheeted and pillowed bed, made every morning by my maid, and my meals were cooked to order by Lisa, the hotel’s peacetime cook, who got us all kinds of delicacies by trading powdered eggs and Spam for fresh Italian veggies and other edibles. And I got some of my own writing done, though, unfortunately, little of it was on the squadron history.

 
To be continued.

 
Related posts:

• My War, Part 1
• Hal Clement: Major Harry Stubbs
• How I Lost My Oldest Friend (and Gained a Literary Agency)

 

See, I wanted to get into the action This was World War II, and it was my personal war. I wanted to fight. When I was inducted, they put me, as they did everybody, through a battery of tests, and when they looked at all the results they said, “Boy, you qualified for everything. Now, you have to list what branch of service you want to serve in and, bam, then you’re off to basic training in that service and pretty soon you’re in the war, right where you want to be.”

So I took the list and checked off my three choices.

Number One was Infantry. That was the down-and-bloody place for fighting, and they said, “You put that down anywhere as a choice and that’s where you’ll go, because that’s where they need replacements all the time.” Just to make sure, I put Field Artillery as my second choice and Armored Corps as my third, and next thing you know, I’m on my way to basic training.

In the Air Force.

That’s when I began to perceive that they didn’t really much care what I wanted. Somewhere somebody was making arcane calculations of what the Army wanted. And that’s what they chose.

All right, I was in the Air Force. Then they kept me stooging around the Lower Forty-eight for two years before they at last dumped me into the hopper of the 456th Bomb Group (Heavy) weather station in Italy. It was just in time.

The rumbling and grumbling roar of B-24 motors was coming from every one of those takeoff strips that sprawled over what had once been Italian farm fields and olive groves. We weathermen just arriving from the States had got there in such a hurry that I had already pulled my first shift in the weather station by the time I dumped my baggage in the four-man tent, one of whose cots would be my home for the foreseeable future.

At last! I was in the war! The proof of that was right overhead, where some three hundred or so lubberly B-24s were fighting every attempt of their pilots to gain altitude so they could form up for the long pull across the Mediterranean to where their war would start — No! Had started already!

Once I was outside, I could see in the last glimmer of daylight those chubby B-24s nuzzling into their formations, a few of them all formed up already and already starting to line out across the Mediterranean Sea toward southern France. That’s what it was, the invasion of Southern France, begun at last! And every American and British bomber and fighter in Italy or North Africa was joining in the fight.

The sky was full dark now, stars beginning to appear, along with the little running lights of all those planes — no! It wasn’t dark! Two great blossoms of red and yellow fire swelled overhead, followed at once by the great ker-BANG blast of two B-24s that had cut their turns too fine and exploded in the air as they turned into a collision … and then, suddenly, another immense ker-BANG from a little farther away, as two more B-24s collided … and then a single, smaller blast as a plane flying by itself caught a chunk of wreckage from one of the collisions and itself blew up.

That was five heavy bombers afire at once in the sky over the 456th Bomb Group. Ten men in each crew. Fifty human beings dying before my eyes.

And the next morning at daybreak, every last cook, clerk or MP in the 456th Bomb Group was rousted out of his bed at dawn and set to join one of the wobbly lines of searchers that trudged across the earth under where the explosions had been, looking for a head, a thumb, an ear, a boot with something that once had contained a living human’s foot, to turn over to the graves registration squadrons to try their luck at identification.

That’s what I saw that first night with the 456th. There were ten men, from pilot to tailgunner, in each of those five blown-up bombers, but there were no parachutes and no survivors.

Oh, I was in the war all right. I just wasn’t allowed to do any fighting.

 
To be continued.

 
Related posts:

• Hal Clement: Major Harry Stubbs
• How I Lost My Oldest Friend (and Gained a Literary Agency)

When I say I grew up in Brooklyn, those who are aware that Brooklyn is nothing grander than just one of the five boroughs of the megalopolis called New York are likely to have a mental picture of a six-year-old dodging trolleys for his life and never seeing a tree leaf out in the springtime.

It wasn’t like that. Oh, sure the traffic and the trolleys were only steps away on Flatbush Avenue. I rarely tried to cross Flatbush Avenue, though. Didn’t care for all that traffic, and in the side streets where people lived it wasn’t so bad. And gigantic, wonderful Prospect Park was only a ten-minute walk away, and if I wanted real National Park-type open space there were huge chunks of that a lot closer than you might imagine.

My grandparents came from the same little town in Germany but didn’t meet until they had independently immigrated to the States. There they lived in Broad Channel, in a house my grandfather, a carpenter by trade in Germany, had built himself for his bride and their expected flock of German-American kids, of whom my father was the seventh and last. That little house at 1404 Cross Bay Boulevard had an unusual distinction Its front door was in Queens, another of NYC’s flock of boroughs.

The back door, though, opened onto Jamaica Bay, an integral part of the one and only one of the America’s National Parks (20,000 acres broad and offering populations of more than 300 species of birds and similar populations of marine animals and vegetation) that you can get to on the subway.

If you want more technology than that, the Bay is bracketed at one end by Floyd Bennett Field, New York’s first city-owned airport, and at the other by no less than JFK itself, with the big jets screaming every few minutes as they depart for destinations in America, Europe, Africa, Australia — for the world.

 

I tried to figure out why I had been so open with Professor Betty and so closed-mouthed with most of the rest of the world.

I finally figured it out. I hadn’t want to discuss it with anybody, I just wanted to spill it out and get rid of it, so it had to be a stranger. And when I woke up the next morning, I did feel that a weight had been lifted off my chest.

I had obligations to MidAmeriCon that day, but I couldn’t see anything past that afternoon that I couldn’t just skip. So I sat in on the Saturday morning breakfast, with Robert Heinlein (the guest of honor, remember?) at the head of the table and being sure to chatter with each of the special guests, and I gave my “Thank You For Being You, Robert” speech at one-thirty, as promised. It went well, especially with my one big joke — “And, Mr. Chairman. I see you’ve got a Robert A. Heinlein luncheon promised for tomorrow, but this is a big con and he hasn’t gained any weight. Are you sure there’s enough of him to go around?”

And then I pocketed the cash refund for the unused day of my stay and got in a cab and a little over an hour later we were taking off from my favorite airport and I was on my way home.

More, when I write it.

 
Related posts:

• Arrival: The Happiest Airport
• Arrival, Part 2: Heinlein Stories
• Arrival, Part 3: KC in the GOP’s Wake
• Arrival, Part 4: The Party Plan
• Arrival, Part 5: ‘I guess I am’
• Arrival, Part 6: The Deal

Carol Pohl

When I realized how much I had told this Dr. Hull of the sort of things I had made a point of keeping quiet about, I couldn’t help wondering why she hadn’t at least smelled my breath before letting me talk about all the things I hadn’t been willing to tell anyone else about the deal Carol and I had made.

Or, I should say, The Deal, because talking about terminating our marriage certainly was a big enough thing in our lives to be worth capital letters. Almost twenty-five years. Four kids — very parent-conscious ones, too, because they were accustomed to a (singular) Mom and a (singular) Dad, never mind that the biological facts of life were really more complicated than that for at least the first two of them.

 
Backflash: When it began to look as though my custody differences with Judy (my daughter Annie’s original mother, remember?), would only get official if we argued them out in a court of law, and in that event if Carol and I married we would have a pretty good-sized legal argument if only because we had a stable home life — that is, not flitting per whim all over the place. You follow my argument? Carol and I, plaintiffs, legally married, Judy and What’s-His-Name — Walter Miller — the writer she was roaming the country with, openly unmarried but acting as though they were.

So I had asked Carol, “Care for getting married one day soon?” and she said sure. With quite a few added reservations and qualifications, it is true, of the “Like this” or “Like that” kind, but acceptable ones. For instance, if she inadvertently became pregnant we had to rethink the whole thing, which I agreed to at once. And what it all added up to, it seemed to me, — finally — was a quite nice life for at least the next year.

And the year after that. That life Carol and I had shared for more than twenty years, only she didn’t — or at least very likely she didn’t — want to share it with me any more.

 
All clear? Well, no.

 
To be continued.

 
Related posts:

• Arrival: The Happiest Airport
• Arrival, Part 2: Heinlein Stories
• Arrival, Part 3: KC in the GOP’s Wake
• Arrival, Part 4: The Party Plan
• Arrival, Part 5: ‘I guess I am’

Jack Williamson

Where we left off: MidAmeriCon, August 1976 — As I gave her a foot rub, Dr. Hull said, “I forgot to ask you. Are you married, Frederik?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I am, at least for the next, let me see, four months. After that, we’ll see.”

She didn’t respond to that in words, just waited me out. I gave in to her silence. “Carol and I have been married for almost twenty-five years,” I told her.

She waited me out some more, so I gave her the hard part: “But all she’s willing to guarantee right now is, we’ll stay married right up till New Year’s Day. Then we sit down together and decide if we want to stay married for life, or—”

She didn’t stop outwaiting me, just reached up for the hot coffeepot and refilled our cups.

“Or not,” I said. “See, this was happening on this last New Year’s Day, when we were making jokey resolutions. Only when we started making resolutions about staying married, it stopped being a joke. Shall we hit the SFWA room party now?”

 
We hit it, and once we got past the guardian at the gate she didn’t need any further help from me. Jack Williamson and a few other old-timers were looking at some foreign sf magazines near the door, and when she caught sight of him and started toward him, he gave her a big “Hello.” Turned out they had met at some Midwest thing a year or so before.

I spent the next half hour talking SFWA business with whoever happened by, and just when I was thinking of telling her I needed to leave, she came over to me to say she had to get up in the morning but Jack’s room was on the same floor as hers in that other hotel, and he had offered to walk her home.

“And he promised to let me in here again, so I won’t need to bother you,” she said, and thanked me and was gone.

To be continued.

 
Related posts:

• Arrival: The Happiest Airport
• Arrival, Part 2: Heinlein Stories
• Arrival, Part 3: KC in the GOP’s Wake
• Arrival, Part 4: The Party Plan