He showed her photographs of whooping cranes to prove the bird’s identity, even showed her printouts of its population numbers to illustrate the impossibility of the mass descent they had seen, but she only nodded, smiling sadly and tolerantly but showing little interest.
Now she said, across the air between them, —The Christians had it right all along.
He laid the bird down in the dirt.
—History is over.
When they got back to the hotel it was snowing lightly, at a slant. It was early for snow and the large flakes melted as soon as they touched the ground. In the hotel parking lot were Larry and his friends. The Christian leaders and all their thousands were already dispersing far and wide, but failure had not yet quelched Larry. Despite the fact that the massacre had not been reported on television or newspapers, that a sudden and complete radio silence had descended on everything they were doing, that television and newspaper reporters did not return the calls he made to them, Larry and his friends were still waiting for the scientists to return. They had not given up. They huddled in groups, drinking hot chocolate and coffee from plastic travel mugs covered in stickers, rubbing their hands in thick woolen mittens and discussing the situation in urgent voices as snowflakes alit on their shoulders and hair. They had sent out electronic alerts and volunteers all over the city were tacking up MISSING posters.
Ann and Ben did not join them. They only walked past with their faces set in pleasant neutrality and raised their hands half-heartedly to wave.
The day after that they were listless and did not know what to do. While they waited in line to see a movie, standing outside a multiplex at a mall in the suburbs, she said it.
—We’ll never see them again.
He could not contradict her so he lifted his cardboard cup of tea to his lips and sipped. He liked the narrow pressure of the rounded white rim.
—They came and went, she said. —They did what they had to do but it was no use. And now they’re gone from us.
—The birds took them, he said.
She nodded vaguely and looked away from him into the mall’s food court, where a man dressed as a hot dog hopped first on one leg and then on the other.
He wondered if there would be an end to the effort to understand. What would happen in the future felt more known to him than what had happened already, though both were elusive. The scientists had flown into the sunset on the wings of birds he was sure could not exist anymore. Had Fermi known? Either he had known or he had summoned them.
First he had come, and Oppenheimer and Szilard, and they had stayed a while. This was impossible. Then the impossible birds had come, the birds long gone extinct.
And finally they had disappeared together.
Larry knocked on the door of their hotel room that night while Ann was in the shower. Ben let him in and watched with moderate interest as he sat down at the small round table to roll a joint.
—So Clint disappeared after the event, said Larry. —Never saw him again. You notice?
—Good riddance, said Ben.
—That chick Sheila? said Larry. —She just came to see me. She was looking for Ann but she couldn’t find her and she was in a hurry so she settled for me. She says she saw him afterward.
—Who? After what?
—Clint. She says she was able to get close because they didn’t know her. She says she saw him loading bodies into the trucks.
—I don’t get it.
He looked at Larry’s face then, which was haggard in the yellow cast of the table lamp. For once Larry seemed as old as he was, not a rugged boy surfer with sun-weathered skin but a sad man in his middle forties trying to cling to youth.
—He was with the Covert Ops guys, the Green Berets or whoever they were. The ones that did the shooting. She said he was one of them. She said he was doing what they did. She said he was talking to them like he knew them, all familiar, you know? She said he had a weapon in a holster and he was dragging one of Bradley’s guys across the ground by his feet. She says he slung him in the back of a truck like garbage.
Ben gazed at him for a time, his crisp blue irises beneath the lined forehead, until Larry lifted a joint to his lips, inhaled, held his breath, and then handed the joint to him.
—What does that mean?
—I think, said Larry slowly after he let out his breath, —he was working for them the whole time.
—Clint was undercover?
Larry nodded and Ben closed his eyes as he held the smoke in his mouth. When he opened them again he asked, —Undercover for who?
—Glen warned me, man. I shouldn’t have trusted him. He always wanted money. He was all about that. They probably paid him a lot to spy on us.
—Undercover for who? repeated Ben, impatient with his own confusion.
—You know, said Larry, and looked away from him to the bathroom, where Ann was standing wrapped in a towel. He lowered his voice. —The ones who were going to kill Oppenheimer. Before the birds took him.
Between the invention of nuclear weapons and the turn of the twenty-first century the U.S. spent over five trillion dollars building and maintaining its nuclear arsenal—about one-tenth of the country’s total spending since 1940. In America, annual spending on past and present military activities exceeds spending on all other categories of human need; approximately eighty percent of the national debt is estimated to have been created by military expenditures.
The so-called “military-industrial complex” about which Eisenhower warned is thus, in a sense, the single largest consumer of the country’s resources. It might fairly be seen as the prime mover of the U.S. government.
