"Thanks," he said.
"Not at all, Mike. I don"t want you to go I want you here but I know how important this is to you." She shrugged forlornly. "So go."
"We still have a couple of days," he said.
"Tonight and tomorrow night," she corrected him. "You"ll be leaving on Friday. G.o.ddammit, I think I"m gonna cry. G.o.dd.a.m.n you, Mike Bradley!"
She pushed her chair back, stood up, and rushed out. Bradley followed her, forcing his way through a sea of bobbing heads and flushed faces, all of which were hazed in smoke and exuding aromas of alcohol. Gladys didn"t look back, but instead hurried across the lobby and straight up the stairs. Bradley went in hot pursuit, thinking of how familiar this great hotel must seem to her, as she had now lived in it for so long. It was an odd thing to think, but it was based on pure jealousy, for he also thought of all the men she had met here throughout the war years. He felt a spasm of pain, a flash of resentment for all those men, as he hurried up the stairs. He eventually caught her in the corridor, right outside her room, and tugged her around and into his arms as she was opening the door.
Gladys Kinder was crying.
Bradley kissed her tears away, surprised to find himself doing so, and rocked her trembling body in his arms and eased her into the room. He kicked the door closed behind him, licked her eyelids, kissed her cheeks, stroked her spine as he kissed her on the lips, and then held her away from him. She was shaking and the tears had streaked her cheeks and made her look a lot younger.
It was a small room and the bed was right behind her, but he didn"t know what to do.
"It"s been so long," he said. "I don"t know where to begin. I"m too old for this. I don"t have the knack. I hardly know where to start."
Gladys smiled through her tears, wiped the tears away with one hand, tried to control her heavy breathing, and said, "You"ve already started, Mike, and you did it well. For G.o.d"s sake, don"t stop now." And she put her hands on his shoulders and pulled him to her and kissed him, then let him press her back onto the bed where it would happen or not.
Bradley lost his senses then. That was G.o.d"s blessing upon him. He somehow managed to strip Gladys and remove his own clothes and get under the sheets of the bed without thinking about it. When they made love, which came naturally as well, they were tuned into the cosmos and Bradley, nearly fifty years old, was returned to his youth.
Her bed felt like home to him.
The next day, satiated with love, Bradley reported to SOE headquarters on Baker Street, where Lieutenant Colonel Wentworth-King frostily informed him that orders from above had removed him from the jurisdiction of SOE and were placing him under the command of the director of the Manhattan atomic bomb project, for which he would implement Operation Paperclip immediately.
"Here are your marching orders," Wentworth-King said, pushing across a thick envelope. "Good-bye and good luck."
That night, all night, Bradley made love to Gladys in his bed in the small apartment in Shepherd Market while doodle-bugs rained from the sky and exploded all over the city. He found new life in the midst of death, saw the light of hope in darkness, slept the sleep of the blessed, and awakened just after dawn.
The s.p.a.ce beside him was empty. Gladys was gone. When he went into the bathroom, he saw her message on the mirror, scrawled in lipstick in a shaky, emotional hand.
"I can"t bear the thought of seeing your eyes when we have to say goodbye, so I"m saying it now. I love you. I..."
But the writing ended there, tapering off in a jagged line, and he knew that she had then started crying and hurried from the room. He put his hand out, gently touched the lipstick, traced the words with his fingers.
"Take care," he whispered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.
Wilson awakened, as he had planned, at six in the evening and found himself thinking about himself. He had slept through the afternoon because the journey to Thuringia was going to be made under cover of darkness. Now, as he lay in bed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and hearing the news on the radio in the living room, doubtless turned on by Greta, he wondered if this thinking about himself, which was unusual, had been caused by the temporary change in his sleeping habits.
He hadn"t thought about himself in many years and was very surprised. He had always looked outward, not inward, and this introspection was troubling.
He was remembering Iowa, the days of his childhood, the parents whose decency he had always viewed strictly as weakness. Now, when he closed his eyes, he saw himself as a blond-haired boy, his skin bronzed from the sun, and the sun itself an immense, silvery orb in a dazzling blue sky. He had stood alone in the field of wheat, the stalks shoulder high around him, and looked across that yellow sea to where green fields met blue sky, then squinted into the sun"s striations, which were silvery and ravishing. He had looked but not been ravished, been blinded but not dazzled, and responded to it, even at ten years old, with one simple question: When would the sun die?
That single question had turned him into a scientist. His religion became the pursuit of knowledge. He realized that the sun would die eventually, taking with it Earth"s heat and light, and that long before it happened every form of life on Earth would be extinguished. Man"s time on Earth, then, would be short if he simply followed nature"s course. Still an animal, he would die off like the dinosaurs as his lifegiving sun died. Something had to be done.
Thus Wilson, at ten years of age, had found something to live for: the changing of man"s destiny through science and, incidentally, the creation of a new kind of man as a means of continuance.
He had never strayed from that path.
Even then, as a boy and adolescent in Iowa, born of religious parents but unable to accept G.o.d, he had been convinced that mankind would eventually have to leave Earth and inhabit another, less endangered planet. To do so, he would have to create an extraordinary technology; he would also have to transcend his still-primitive nature and escape the physical limitations of his weak, mortal body.
Man would have to turn himself into a Superman and then reach for the stars.
Now, sixty-five years later, as he sat up in the bed in his apartment in Berlin, Wilson was made aware of his own frustrating mortality, but also reminded that he had at least begun the process of turning Man into Superman.
He had the beginnings of the technology in the shape of his flying saucer, a protected base from which to operate in Neuschwabenland, Antarctica, and a demented ideology that, if not to his personal taste, could be used to give him the work force necessary for survival in an inhospitable terrain, isolated under the ground from the rest of mankind.
He would use Himmler"s disillusioned followers to get him to the Antarctic and there, over the years, let science gradually transform them into his kind of people: neither dedicated soldiers nor fanatical mystics, but men ruled by the desire for knowledge as an end in itself, supported by a docile work force deprived of freedom and will, and all living together in perfect, enforced harmony, well away from the corrupting influences of a still-primitive, self-destructive mankind.
And eventually, when the technology used for the Kugelblitz saucer had advanced enough, his successors would leave the dying earth behind and fly to the stars.
Those chosen to make that epic voyage would have to be Supermen
but he, who had made it all possible, would not be one of them.
He would die before that came to be.