Gods Without Men

1947

First time Schmidt saw the Pinnacles he knew it was the place. Three columns of rock shot up like the tentacles of some ancient creature, weathered feelers probing the sky. He ran a couple of tests, used the divining rods and the earth meter. Needle went off the scale. No question, there was power here, running along the fault line and up through the rocks: a natural antenna. The deal was done quickly. Eight hundred bucks to the old woman who owned the lot, some papers to sign at a law office in Victorville and it was his. Twenty-year lease, easy as pie. He couldn’t believe his luck.

He bought a used Airstream off a lot in Barstow, towed it onto the site, and sat for a whole afternoon in a lawn chair, admiring the way the aluminum trailer reflected the light. Took him back to the Pacific, the Superforts on their hardstands at North Field. The way those bombers glittered in the sun. There was a lesson in that dazzle, showed there were worlds a person couldn’t bear to look upon directly.

He didn’t sleep at all the first night. Lying under a blanket on the ground, staring straight up, he kept his eyes open until the blacks turned purple, then gray, and the wool was frosted with little droplets of condensation like tiny diamonds. The desert smell of creosote and sage, the dome of stars. There was more action up in the sky than down on Earth, but you had to drag yourself out of the city to know it. All those damn verticals cluttering your sightline, all the steel pipes and cables and so forth under your feet, jamming you up, interrupting the flows. People hadn’t fooled with the desert. It was land that let you alone.

He thought he stood a good chance. He was still young enough to take on the physical work, unencumbered by wife or family. And he had faith. Without that he’d have given up long ago, back when he was still a kid reading mail-order tracts on his lunch break, making his first tentative notes on the mysteries. Now he wanted no distractions. He didn’t bother about the good opinion of the folks in town. He was polite, passed the time of day when he went to pick up supplies at the store, but didn’t trouble himself further. Most men were fools; he’d found that out on Guam. Sons of bitches never would let him be, giving him nicknames, making childish jokes at his expense. Took all he had not to do what was on his mind, but after Lizzie he didn’t have the right, so he’d tamped down his anger and got on with fighting the war. Those saps had flown lord knew how many missions and with all those hours logged, all that chance to see, they still thought the real world was down on the ground, in the chow line, between the legs of the pinup girls they pasted over their rancid cots. Only person he met with a lick of sense was that Irish bombardier, what was his name, Mulligan or Flanagan, some Irish name, who told him of the lights he’d spotted when they were on their way to drop a load over Nagoya, green dots moving too fast to be Zeroes. Asked to borrow a book. Schmidt lent it to him, never did get it back. Kid went down with the rest of his crew a week later, ditched into the sea.

Little by little, the place came together. The trailer was hot as all hell and he was trying to work out some way to utilize the shade of the rocks when he found the prospector’s burrow. Didn’t know what it was until he asked at the bar in town. Concreted over a few years previous when they flushed the old bastard out, some story about thinking he was a German spy. Crazy as a coot he may have been, probably starving to death since there wasn’t a cent of silver or anything else on his so-called claim, but he knew how to dig. A whole room, four hundred square feet, right under the rocks. Cool in summer, insulated against the winter nights. A goddamn bunker.

After that it was all gravy. He graded an airstrip, sunk a gas tank into the dirt, threw up a cinder-block shelter and painted WELCOME in big white letters on the tin roof. Now he had a business. The café was never going to amount to much, but then he didn’t need it to be General Motors. He felt he could have gotten along without another living soul, but his savings weren’t going to last forever. He had another year, perhaps two, before money got tight, just about the right time for an enterprise like that to find its feet.

There weren’t too many passing aircraft. About once a week someone would land. He’d serve them coffee, fry eggs. When they asked what he was doing out there he’d say just waiting, and when they asked what for he’d say he didn’t know yet but it sure beat sitting in traffic, and that was usually enough for them. He’d never take visitors down into the bunker. After a few months the numbers increased. Pilots flying to and from the coast began to hear there was a place to refuel. He bought some chairs and Formica-top tables, laid in a stock of beer.

There were problems, of course. His generator broke down. There was a confrontation with some Indians he caught clambering about on the rocks, had to show them his shotgun. After they went away he found rock drawings up there, handprints and snakes and bighorn sheep. Another day a dust storm forced a plane down. The wind was blowing sideways across the strip at fifty miles an hour and the pilot did well to land at all — looked like it would pick up his left wing and flip him as he made his approach. Schmidt ran out to meet him, holding a bandanna over his mouth. Without thinking he took him underground, the logical place to shelter.

The pilot was a young buck, twenty-one or so, head of dark hair, little dandyish mustache. Rich kid. As he stripped off his jacket and goggles, he looked around in wonder, asked where on earth he was.

By that time the project was well advanced. Schmidt had built a vortical condenser to store and concentrate the paraphysical energies flowing through the rocks. A crystal was set into a gimbal on the tip of the tallest stack, angled toward Venus. He was developing a parallel piezoelectric system, based on his study of Tesla, but for now was sending signals using an old Morse key, with an aetheric converter to transform the physical clicks into modulations of the paraphysical carrier wave. He explained all this to the pilot, who listened intently, taking in the machinery, the piles of books and notes. He seemed impressed.

“And what message are you sending?”

There was a question. Schmidt’s message was love. Love and brotherhood to all beings in the galaxy. Two hours of redemption nightly, starting soon as the planet was visible over the horizon. Two hours of repeating his invitation: WELCOME. He didn’t want to talk about it, not with a stranger, made some joke about higher powers, more things than were visible to the naked eye.

The pilot smiled. “Hope you know what you’re doing.”

“We’ll see, I suppose.”

From then on the kid would land his Cub at the Pinnacles every couple of weeks. His daddy was some big farmer down in Imperial Valley, but Davis, that was his name, wanted more out of life than orange groves and wetback pickers. Though Schmidt didn’t ask for a thing, he gave him money to buy books and equipment. Clark Davis was the first disciple, the first to understand the true nature of Schmidt’s calling.

One night they flew over the Nevada state line, touched down at a ranch near Pahrump, a property with neon beer signs in the windows and a row of semis parked out front. Davis wanted to show him a good time, said it wasn’t normal to be on his own so much. Against his better judgment — the whole escapade was against his better judgment — Schmidt found himself sitting nervously, drink in hand, as the girls lined up in their silky nothings, pouting and sticking out their behinds. Davis acted all man-of-the-world, choosing a big-titted greaser and winking encouragingly as he followed her out, like Schmidt was some nervous teenager getting his dick wet for the first time. That got his back up. He downed his brandy, asked for another. He hadn’t touched alcohol since that last night with Lizzie and soon he remembered why; though the little blonde scrap he chose was cute and gentle as could be, he just felt angry at her, at himself, really, and she must have gotten scared and pressed a button or something because before too long he was outside with his pants in his hands, hunting for his other boot in the parking lot.

He tried to explain it to Davis. How he’d been a wild boy, too much for his broke-down mother. How he didn’t care to know about school or a trade, just wanted a big canvas for his young life and air that didn’t taste of sulfur, so he hopped a freight and never once looked back at the smokestacks of Erie, Pennsylvania. By seventeen he was working the line at a salmon cannery in Bristol Bay, spending his pay in the bars and getting himself into every kind of trouble, which eventually added up to Lizzie, who was all of fourteen years old, half-blood native and crazier than he was. Took him in her mouth in the doorway of a warehouse on the docks and it was like a band started playing inside his skull. Before too long she was pregnant and then he really was in the shit because she had brothers and her father was some town big shot, more or less dragged the two of them to church just to save the family reputation. The old man hated Schmidt’s guts for obvious reasons but to do him justice he tried to be decent, set them up in a little place, even gave money for the kid. Catch was Schmidt didn’t like charity, and he certainly didn’t like to feel trapped, and because the little boy’s screams set him on edge and because he’d somehow lost his taste for her, he started slapping Lizzie around. Her menfolk warned him and each time it happened he cried in the girl’s lap and swore he’d do better, but the arguments only left him feeling sore and cornered, and then one night he drank more than usual and she talked back and somehow he ended up tying a noose round her neck and dragging her half a mile behind his truck before he came to his senses and hit the brake.

She survived, though she didn’t look the same after. In the lockup some boys held him down and messed with him and he thought they’d kill him because they said they’d been paid by Lizzie’s daddy, but they let up when they’d done their business and he pulled on his pants and lay down in a corner of his cell and was still lying there when the Russian came to bail him out. The Russian had owed him ever since Schmidt stopped him from putting some guy out of a third-floor window at the Friday-night card game. Think of all the years, said Schmidt, and the Russian, whiskey-deaf as he was, took heed. He was dangling the whimpering cheat by his ankles, about drunk enough to drop him, but instead he lifted him back in and gave him a couple of taps on the jaw and no more was said on the matter. Next morning when he sobered up he thanked Schmidt, said if he ever got into trouble he’d be there. The Russian’s two hundred bucks was Schmidt’s first stroke of luck. Second was when the police chief turned up at the door and told him that if he left the Territory that same afternoon, Lizzie’s old man wouldn’t press charges. Reputation again. Worth more to him than his half-breed daughter, it appeared.

So Schmidt headed south, and though he tried to tough it out, told the story to men he worked or roomed with like it was some kind of joke, the guilt grew on him until it blotted out all happiness and he knew he’d kill himself unless he did something to get back right with the world. I’m just scum, he’d say to anyone who’d listen. Can’t help it, always been that way. And he thought he always would be, thought it was impossible to change, until he found out that impossible is a word found only in the dictionary of fools, which was a quotation, his first, the second being If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you, a saying he picked out of an old copy of Reader’s Digest and which gave him the notion, foreign to him until that time, that you could find truth in the written word. Thereafter he made a habit of seeking out such written truths and copying them down, first on scraps of paper, then in notebooks, until finally he realized he was working toward a system, such an understanding of the world as very few possessed. He read as much as he could, devoured books in every spare minute of his day, and never again touched liquor until Davis persuaded him into it, and only then out of some momentary wish to be like other people, a right he knew deep down he’d forfeited.

Davis listened to his story without saying a word. It was several weeks before he visited again.

Schmidt busied himself with signaling and watching the sky, plowing the furrow he’d started with those few scattered quotations. His search had led him first to the Bible, and then other books. He always suspected that any valuable truth would be hidden, that unless you had to dig for a thing, it wasn’t worth possessing. A year or two passed, and he’d found himself in Seattle, pushing a mop around the inside of a T-hangar as engineers worked on aircraft whose size and complexity seemed like a miracle. Watching the great machines take off and land, the way the Earth relinquished them and gently welcomed them back, he felt that here was the secret made manifest. He decided to become a pilot, but when he went for a sight test, they told him he was astigmatic. That route was closed.

He went to the office and asked how to get a job as an aircraft mechanic. Technical school, replied the manager, and soon Schmidt was taking classes during the day and working nights as a security guard. By the time the war in Europe started, he had a steady job at Boeing Field and a bungalow full of books, their margins blackened by his spidery writing. The shape of his project was becoming clear: how to connect the mysteries of technology with those of the spirit. He knew the aircraft he worked on — with their tangled skeins of electrical cable, their hydraulics, their finely calibrated gauges that monitored fuel levels and engine power — were only half the story. There were forces greater and more intangible than thrust and torque and lift. It had fallen to him to unify them. Perhaps when he was brought before his maker, he would be judged not as a monster but as a bringer of light, a good man.

After Pearl Harbor he was reassigned to the XB-29 project, rushing out a new long-range bomber for use against the Japanese. The schedule was punishing. The aircraft had all kinds of problems, overheating engines, mysterious electrical faults that took days to trace. One day a test pilot lost control of a prototype, crashing through a power line into a nearby packing plant. The ground crew jumped into trucks and cars and drove toward the burning building, trying to get close enough to the wreckage to see if anyone could be saved. Thirty people died.

The engine problems wouldn’t go away, and once the bomber went into production just about every part the plants churned out was defective. The generals wanted the planes in China to start operations, but on the date they were due to leave, not a single one was ready. Schmidt was posted to Wichita, working double shifts in a snowstorm, overseeing a crew performing final mods on the navigation system. They had to turn around every twenty minutes, because that was the longest anyone could stay outside before frostbite set in. At last the planes started flying east, only to be grounded in Egypt when the engines, which had more or less worked at freezing point, started malfunctioning in the hundred-and-twenty-degree heat. Schmidt was sent out to retrofit new baffles and a cooling system, designed more or less on the fly by a team working out of a hangar at the Cairo airfield.

The B-29s limped on; Schmidt went with them. Cockpit temperatures climbed to a hundred and seventy, then fell to minus twenty over the Himalayas as the airframes were tested almost to destruction by violent downdrafts and side winds that threw the giant planes around like balsawood toys. He peered through the clouds and caught glimpses of valleys and gorges, rivers, villages, every so often the bright unnerving gleam of aluminum wreckage on the black mountainsides. Something protected him, and a week after flying over the hump he was standing on the tarmac at Hsinching. Peasants straightened up from their paddies at the airfield’s edge, shielding their eyes to watch ninety bombers of the 58th Wing take off on their way to the Showa steelworks in Anshan. He was almost hallucinating with tiredness, having spent the previous forty-eight hours field-modding the big Wright Cyclone engines, trying to stop the cascade of horrors that unfolded when things went wrong in midair: valve heads flying off and chewing up the cylinders, tiny leaks of hydraulic fluid that could prevent the pilot from feathering a stalled prop, so that it started to drag and then sheared off, or worse, seized up the whole engine, which then twisted right out of the wing. The planes looked like huge white birds, like angels. He felt a sort of queasy elation. He was atoning; he was helping win the war.

In early ’45 they moved forward operations to the Mariana Islands. On Guam, Schmidt spent his breaks sitting in a deck chair by the enlisted men’s mess at North Field, reading Isis Unveiled in an edition he’d bought from a Theosophical bookshop in Calcutta. Beyond the perimeter, out in the jungle, were wild animals and half-feral Japanese who’d been stranded when the Imperial Army evacuated. He, on the other hand, was out in the open, in the clear. For the first time in years he allowed himself to feel happy. He heard from aircrew about the incendiary raids, and somehow that didn’t touch him, but then he was transferred to Tinian. The 509th Composite acted like they were the second coming, strutting around as if they owned the whole Pacific and everyone else ought to pay them for the privilege of using it. Rumor was they were testing some new superweapon; as he watched the Enola Gay take off for Hiroshima, Schmidt knew it wasn’t carrying the standard payload, but that was all. Like the rest of the world, he found out through pictures: the burned children, the watches stopped at 8:15. His beautiful gleaming aircraft, the harbingers of light, had been used to unleash darkness. He’d been betrayed.

By the fall of ’46 he was back in Seattle but couldn’t settle into the routine of civilian work. The world seemed to be sliding toward some terrible new evil. The spiritual promise of energy had been perverted: Instead of abolishing poverty and hunger, atomic power would turn the planet into a wasteland. Unable to face going outside, he began to neglect his work. The bungalow was cold and damp. In the evenings he sat in front of the fire and shivered until he fell asleep, imagining the tall conifers outside the window closing in and blotting out the sky.

He quit before they could fire him, withdrew his savings from the bank, packed his library and his papers into his ’38 Ford pickup and headed for the desert. In his mind he saw himself as one of the prophets of old, an ascetic sitting cross-legged in a cave. He would mortify his body, purify his mind. The world had split in two, either side of the Iron Curtain. He would heal the wound. His intention was to summon the only force powerful enough to transcend Communism and Capitalism and halt the cascade of destructive energies. Since the dawn of history there had been contact with extraterrestrial intelligences. Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels, the Mayan space pilots, the cosmic weaponry of Vedic India — the visitors possessed a spiritual technology far in advance of the crude mechanisms of earth science. It was time for them to manifest themselves, to intervene in the lives of men.

So he sent out his invitation. Two hours a night — two hours to atone for Lizzie, for the bombing raids, for all the misery of existence on Earth. As he scanned the skies, he saw many things: meteor showers, bright lights moving in formation over the Tehachapi Mountains. Sometimes military jets flew overhead, threading vapor trails through the blue.

One hot night he was sitting outside, dozing after his usual dinner of canned franks and beans. In the distance a coyote was whining, and the sound penetrated his sleep. He opened his eyes and stretched, thinking about going down into the bunker to get a cigarette. That was when he saw it: a bright point of light hanging low over the horizon. The sky was hazy, loaded with dust whipped up by a couple of days of high winds, and it took a few moments before he was sure of what he was seeing. As he watched, dry-mouthed, the object got larger, approaching at incredible speed. There was no roar of engines, no sound at all. As it came toward him, he saw it was disk-shaped, featureless but for a ring of iridescent lights round the rim, like gemstones or feline eyes. His body began to tingle with electrical charge, the hairs on his bare arms standing upright. The huge oval hovered overhead, hanging above the rocks as if surveying the ground. Then it descended, stately and imperial, landing in front of him without raising the slightest eddy of sand from the desert floor. It was, he thought, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

Once it had landed, the craft began to pulse — that was the only way he could put it — glowing pale green, then modulating through purple and rose, a gentle throb like a heartbeat. He couldn’t suppress a gasp as a door opened in the hull and a ramp unfolded, like the tendril of a tropical plant. In the threshold stood two human figures, one male, the other voluptuously female. Their blond hair was agitated by some ethereal wind, though the night air was close and still. Their skin was so pale as to be almost translucent, and in each of their noble faces was set a pair of remarkable gray eyes, animated with profound compassion and intelligence. The pair were dressed in simple white robes, belted at the waist with bright metallic chains. They smiled at him, and he was bathed in a sensation of all-encompassing benevolence. Come, said a voice — not out loud but silently, in the depths of his mind. It was rich and sonorous. It resonated through him like a prayer. Come inside. We have something to show you. At last, he thought. Smiling, he stepped forward into the light.