patch of flaming oil, then makes another hard turn and continues towards their objective.
The explosion of the Zero sent everyone back down behind their sandbags. The General has to climb out of the jeep and peer over the top of the barrier. He holds the antiaircraft shell up above his head. 'Say, Captain,' he says in his perfect radio-announcer voice, 'this arrived on my end table with no return address, but I believe it came from your unit.' The captain's helmeted head pops into view over the top of the sandbags as he jumps to attention. He is gaping at the shell. 'Would you please look after it, and make sure that it has been properly defused?' The General tosses the shell at him sideways, like a watermelon, and the captain barely has the presence of mind to catch it. 'Carry on,' The General says, 'let's see if we can actually shoot down some Nips next time.' He waves disparagingly at the burning wreckage of the Zero and climbs into the jeep with Shaftoe. 'All right, back up the hill, Shaftoe!'
'Yes, sir!'
'Now, I know that you hate me because you are a Marine.'
Officers like it when you pretend to be straight with them. 'Yes, sir, I do hate you, sir, but I do not feel that this need be an impediment to our killing some Nips together, sir!'
'We agree. But in the mission I have in mind for you, Shaftoe, killing Nips will not be the primary objective.'
Shaftoe's a bit off balance now. 'Sir, with all due respect, I believe that killing Nips is my strong point.'
'I don't doubt it. And that is a fine skill for a Marine. Because in this war, a Marine is a first-rate fighting man under the command of admirals who don't know the first thing about ground warfare, and who think that the way to win an island is to hurl their men directly into the teeth of the Nips' prepared defenses.'
The General pauses here, as if giving Shaftoe an opportunity to respond. But Shaftoe says nothing. He is remembering the stories that his brothers told him on Kwajalein, about all the battles they had fought on small Pacific islands, precisely as The General describes.
'Consequently, a Marine must be very good at killing Nips, as I have no doubt you are. But now, Shaftoe, you are in the Army, and in the Army we actually have certain wonderful innovations, such as strategy and tactics, which certain admirals would be well-advised to acquaint themselves with. And so your new job, Shaftoe, is not simply to kill Nips, but to use your head.'
'Well, I know that you probably think I am a stupid jarhead, General, but I do think that I have a good head on my shoulders.'
'And on your shoulders is exactly where I would like it to stay!' The General says, slapping him heartily on the back. 'What we are trying to do now is to create a tactical situation that is favorable to us. Once that is accomplished, the actual killing of Nips can be handled by more efficient means such as aerial bombardment, mass starvation, and the like. It will not be necessary for you to personally cut the throat of every Nip you run into, as eminently qualified as you might be for such an operation.'
'Thank you, General, sir.'
'We have millions of Filipino guerillas, and hundreds of thousands of troops, to handle the essentially quotidian business of turning live Nips into dead, or at least captive, Nips. But in order to coordinate their activities, I need intelligence. That will be one of your missions. But the country is already crawling with my spies, and so it will be a secondary mission.
'And the primary mission, sir?'
'Those Filipinos need leadership. They need coordination. And perhaps most of all, they need fighting spirit.'
'Fighting spirit, sir?'
'There are many reasons for the Filipinos to be down in the dumps. The Nips have not been kind to them. And although I have been very busy, here in New Guinea, preparing the springboard for my return, the Filipinos don't know about any of this, and many of them probably think I have forgotten about them entirely. Now it is time to let them know I'm coming. That I shall return-but soon!'
Shaftoe snickers, thinking that The General is engaging in some self mocking humor here-yes, a bit of
Shaftoe parks the jeep at the apex of a switchback, where they can look northwest across the outermost reaches of the Philippine Sea. The General extends one arm toward Manila, hand slightly cupped, palm canted upward, gesturing like a Shakespearean actor in a posed photo graph. 'Go there, Bobby Shaftoe!' says The General. 'Go there and tell them that I am coming.'
Shaftoe knows his cue, and he knows his line. 'Sir, yes sir!'
Chapter 70 ORIGIN
From the point of view of admittedly privileged white male technocrats such as Randy Waterhouse and his ancestors, the Palouse was like one big live-in laboratory for nonlinear aerodynamics and chaos theory. Not much was alive there, and so one's observations were not forever being clouded by trees, flowers, fauna, and the ploddingly linear and rational endeavors of humans. The Cascades blocked any of those warm, moist, refreshing Pacific breezes, harvesting their moisture to carpet ski areas for dewy-skinned Seattleites, and diverting what remained north to Vancouver or south to Portland. Consequently the Palouse had to get its air shipped down in bulk from the Yukon and British Columbia. It flowed across the blasted volcanic scab land of central Washington in (Randy supposed) a more or less continuous laminar sheet that, when it hit the rolling Palouse country, ramified into a vast system of floods, rivers and rivulets diverging around the bald swelling hills and recombining in the sere declivities. But it never recombined exactly the way it was before. The hills had thrown entropy into the system. Like a handful of nickels in a batch of bread dough this could be kneaded from place to place but never removed. The entropy manifested itself as swirls and violent gusts and ephemeral vortices. All of these things were clearly visible, because all summer the air was full of dust or smoke, and all winter it was full of windblown snow.
Whitman had dust devils (snow devils in the winter) in the way that medieval Guangzhou presumably had rats. Randy followed dust devils to school when he was a kid. Some were small enough that you could almost cup them in your hand, and some were like small tornadoes, fifty or a hundred feet high, that would appear on hilltops or atop shopping malls like biblical prophecies as filtered through the low-budget SFX technology and painfully literal-minded eye of a fifties epic film director. They at least scared the bejesus out of newcomers. When Randy got bored in school, he would look at the window and watch these things chase each other around the empty playground. Sometimes a roughly car-sized dust devil would glide across the four-square courts and between the swingsets and score a direct hit on the jungle gym, which was an old-fashioned, unpadded, child-paralyzing unit hammered together by some kind of Dark Ages ironmonger and planted in solid concrete, a real school-of-hard- knocks, survival-of-the-fittest one. The dust devil would seem to pause as it enveloped the jungle gym. It would completely lose its form and become a puff of dust that would begin to settle back down to the ground as all heavier-than-air things really ought to. But then suddenly the dust devil would reappear on the other side of the jungle gym and keep going. Or perhaps two dust devils would spin off in opposite directions.
Randy spent plenty of time chasing and carrying out impromptu experiments on dust devils while walking to and from school, to the point of getting bounced off the grille of a shrieking Buick once when he chased a roughly shopping-cart-sized one into the street in an attempt to climb into the center of it. He knew that they were both fragile and tenacious. You could stomp down on one of them and sometimes it would just dodge your foot, or swirl around it, and keep going. Other times, like if you tried to catch one in your hands, it would vanish-but then you'd look up and see another one just like it twenty feet away, running away from you. The whole concept of matter spontaneously organizing itself into grotesquely improbable and yet indisputably self perpetuating and fairly robust systems sort of gave Randy the willies later on, when he began to learn about physics.
There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won't fall down or airplanes that won't suddenly
