Gurley would have known, though, and he knew I was mocking him. He scrambled across the desk, right over the top, growling and sputtering.
For a minute, I feared (even hoped) that I had provoked the inevitable and total breakdown. I calculated whether I could get to the door before him and raise the alarm with the MPs. I decided to jump clear. He jumped after me and then fell horribly short. I took a moment to take in the scene: he was sprawled at my feet, while the better part of his left leg was separated from him, dangling off the desk.
He extended a hand, and I hesitated, unsure what horror had just happened and what horror would now follow.
“You didn't hear a word I said, did you, you sanctimonious shit?” he hissed. He closed his eyes for a second; I could see the mask fall, instantly. But then his eyes opened, the mask was back, and it had all happened too quickly for me to see what had been revealed. He extended a hand to me, and I automatically hauled him up. He teetered back to the desk and leaned on it. On the floor behind him lay two red pins that had fallen from the map.
Gurley recovered his artificial leg and regarded it for a second. “Maybe I should just beat you with this instead of going through it all again.” I stared at the leg, then at Gurley. What part of him would fly apart next? “Here's the short version: the Japs are bombing North America. Believe the map, or believe this, you insolent fuck.” He hiked up the pant leg that was missing a leg below the knee and revealed a stump that looked more rock than human-angry purple and brown, mottled with scabs. He spent a moment trying to get the leg back on, and then gave up, letting it clatter to the floor. He hobbled around to the back of the desk and fell into his chair.
I slowly bent down and picked up the leg. It was heavier than I imagined, and it took two hands to place it on the desk with any care.
“Exhibit A,” he said, nodding to the map. “The past.” He dragged his leg back across the desk. “Exhibit B, the interminable present.” Then he took out a small key, unlocked a desk drawer, and drew out a small, leather-bound book, about the size of a priest's breviary. “Exhibit C,” he said, brightening again. “The future.” He looked at the book for a full minute. He didn't open it. Then he looked at me.
“Let's start at the beginning,” he said, and with that, began to recount the history-his history-of the balloon program to date. The first, mysterious explosions and fires. The eventual discovery of an intact balloon. The determination of the balloon's origin. The recovery of ever-growing numbers of balloon shrouds and payloads, evidence of which sat just outside the office.
“And the most recent chapter, August 1944, wherein a certain bomb disposal sergeant looks on, dumbstruck, while a balloon sets fire to a golden hillside. Said fire roasts alive several men.” He sat back. “Sergeant? Am I missing anything?”
“Sir?” I asked, but even as the word was coming out of my mouth, my mind was finally making the connection. It seems odd to me now that it took that long, but of course, the balloons-as patent an impossibility as there ever was-were still new to me then.
I almost leapt from my chair: “The weather balloon! Fort Cronkhite! Sir, I-”
“Failed in your first encounter?” Gurley suggested, somehow managing a face that was half sneer, half sympathy. That wasn't what I was going to say-I had no idea what I was going to say-but his words had all the effect of his having reached over and pulled the pin from a grenade I hadn't known I was carrying.
What a cruel thing to put on a child-sure, I was a young man, a soldier in uniform, but I had the wild conscience and boundless shame of a Catholic kid, one raised by nuns, no less-and how sinister of Gurley to attempt to make the death of those soldiers on the hill my legacy, my burden.
Hours, days later, when I thought about it, I realized his gambit was only that; I knew nothing about the balloons that day in California. And if I had? I was too far away to do anything. But it didn't matter. Gurley knew what he was doing. He'd planted a seed, an irritant, deep inside me that I could smother with excuses but would still know was always there. The fact was, I had known-felt-that something was wrong, that it wasn't a weather balloon. The fact was, I'd gone running toward it. The fact was, I hadn't made it there in time.
If Gurley's aim had been to provoke in me an instant and towering resolve to avenge their deaths (while expiating my own apparent guilt), I suppose the ends would have justified his means: my commitment to the war then was naïve and relatively shallow.
But his next words made me think he had another aim altogether. He wasn't looking to stir up some fight in me; he simply wanted to commiserate.
“That's okay, Sergeant,” he said. “My first time out, I failed, too.”
GURLEY EXPLAINED that he'd begun his wartime service with the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The OSS was the war's headquarters for Ivy Leaguers, spies, scientists, and anyone with an unusual idea for waging war. Poison cigars, exploding pens, buttonhole cameras, and worse. At the bidding of a favorite professor, Gurley had left Princeton a semester early to work in OSS research and development. He should have been a natural. Articulate, cosmopolitan, heir to a fortune (from fountain pens, of all things), he'd also spent his Princeton years studying “the men and minds of the Orient”-in particular, all things Japanese. He was even somewhat fluent. He pointed to an impressively worn Japanese-English dictionary on a shelf behind him.
Yet he'd foundered after enlisting. His ideas-fueled by “ educated insight”-were dismissed. He watched as colleagues championed ridiculous ideas that later turned out to be quite effective, and he watched those colleagues go on to greater rank and glory As the months wore on, Gurley was desperate to find the idea that would make him a star. A huge star: not for him invisible ink or a corncob pipe revolver.
He wanted something spectacular.
He brainstormed and came up blank, and then brainstormed with friends. Blank again. Then he found a memo in a stack of papers that had been left on his desk. A scrap of a confidential memo, actually stamped with a security classification beyond the level Gurley possessed. He should have stopped reading immediately and reported the security breach, but (he admitted) he did not. How could he? The memo referred to a piece of intriguing, if bizarre, research: the enemy- the Japanese-considered blue foxes a bad omen. (I thought, but didn't ask: Who wouldn't?)
Gurley took up the case. His first discovery was the existence of an actual animal- “Alopex lagopus” he took pleasure in informing me-a type of arctic fox whose coat turned bluish-gray in winter. “But it didn't look the least bit frightening-or blue,” Gurley said. Rather, he decided to press ahead in secret with elaborate plans for a truly blue, truly scary fox of his own design, Vulpes livida.
He tested and discarded the idea of air-dropping blue fox leaflets or releasing live, paint-dipped foxes (via parachute? I wondered. Torpedo tubes? Rubber rafts?), and decided on something far more spectacular: projecting a blue fox in the sky above enemy troops. It was bold, theatrical-terrifying. The enemy would panic and throw down their weapons in fear.
It was also impractical, silly, and foolish-but so were dozens of other ideas that the OSS researched, and many of those (including a rotating gun that attached to a railroad car's wheel) had gone forward.
“The fated day came,” Gurley said. “I was to present to the full committee. Now, word had spread of all the hours I had put in. And while most didn't know the details, everyone knew that I was hoping to make my reputation. Some might have uncharitably said, repair my reputation.” Gurley looked at the ceiling a moment, as though he were being fed lines from above. I had a slight urge to look up myself.