“No!”
“Yes!”
“How funny! How’d they get caught?”
“You know Sarge. He came back last Friday about 2:00 a.m. all in a dither because he thought he’d left the office window open. He caught them in flagrante delicto.”
“Oh my god, that’s a scream. I’ll bet his hair stood up.”
“How would anyone tell?”
They laugh and laugh. Gen just loves Viv.
Viv heads down and Gen settles in. Signs in to the logbook, twitches the string to turn off the light, opens all the glass windows wide, buttons her wool coat, puts the binoculars around her neck. The little room was built on the backside of the farmhouse roof, high enough to give views in every direction. Even in cold weather one of the windows is always open so the spotters can hear as well as see. Winter coats advised. There’s a space heater, but it’s best to keep it off so the noise of the fan doesn’t interfere.
Imogen saw the article last September in the Chicago Heights Star, which she often glances at during her lunch break at Victor Chemical. Park Forest needed more volunteers for its Operation Skywatch post, because it was planning to move to twenty-four-hour duty. Imogen snorted at some of the language. Volunteers would be those “who recognize their responsibility to the defense of their home, their community, and their nation.” That kind of talk always sounded Hitlerite to her. She would have forgotten the whole thing except that there was an amusing quote from Sarge in the article, she still remembers it almost verbatim: “One weak point in Operation Skywatch could bring disaster on our nation. It seems unfair to run the risk of having to point a dead finger at yourself in the rubble of a bombed community when volunteering might have saved a life—your own!” The chirpy silliness of it just slayed her. She quoted it to Vernon that evening and it subsequently became a joke between them. If Vernon forgot to pick up milk on his way home from class or lab, Imogen would say, “Well you’ll just have to point a dead finger at yourself.” Or if an argument was getting testy, one of them would say, “Don’t you dare point that dead finger at me!” and it would help them laugh the tension away.
In February another appeal went out. The post still didn’t have round-the-clock coverage, and May to September was the time of year when atmospheric conditions were most propitious for Soviet bombers to, well, you know—do unto us. Maybe because the original article had stayed in her mind all through the winter as a pleasant joke, Imogen found herself tempted.
Just for fun. That’s what she had to say over and over to Vernon, when he thought it was a stupid caprice. You get to learn new things every day, she said. I spend all my time doing tests on phosphorus compounds. I just want a break.
But that’s not a break from work, he said, it’s a break from home.
I just want something new.
Not that she needed his permission, she made that clear. But she didn’t want her sweet big man mad at her. And he certainly was mad at first. But he came around.
She hears the growl of a plane to the north. Goes to the window with the binoculars. On clear nights like this, it’s relatively easy to find the wing and taillights. Soviet bombers would be flying dark, so this aircraft right here and now is probably not the end of Chicago as we know it, but she follows the protocol. Which is awfully crude, but what the hell. They give you a transparent plastic sheet with different-size circles on it, and you fit the plane into one of the circles. If you’ve determined the type of aircraft and thus its size (there’s a poster on the wall, useless in the dark, identifying twenty-five different silhouettes), the circle tells you how far away the plane is, or how high. The way to decide whether you’re measuring distance or height is, if the plane is less than 45 degrees above the horizon, it’s distance; if more than 45 degrees, it’s height. No kidding, that’s really what they teach you during your two hours of “training.” (Trigonometry, anyone?) In any case, in the dark it’s more or less impossible to identify the type of aircraft from its silhouette, so the distance or height measurement is also impossible. Nonetheless, you note the plane’s direction, you pick up the phone, you say (ideally breathlessly), “Aircraft flash! Aircraft flash!” and you’re connected to the Air Defense Filter Center, where you tell them everything you know. Then you hang up, write every detail in the logbook, and go back to dreaming. During Imogen’s training they showed her a peppy little film, so she knows that at the Filter Center a lot of women are standing around a big table map and pushing little airplanes around with croupier sticks as they receive the raw data. There’s a group of self-important men sitting above them making calls to aviation authorities to check the identities of the aircraft. Unidentified aircraft are promptly blasted out of the sky. Ha! Not really, more inquiries are made, very occasionally fighter planes are sent to check them out, or so they claim, and everything always turns out to be innocent.
In other words, what a crock of shit! What a glorious boondoggle!
Of course most of the planes she calls in are approaching or departing O’Hare. High-altitude planes are commercial flights on the transcontinental flight corridor, or our own bombers or fighters, or military reconnaissance flights. Small planes are amateur pilots or business executives’ charter flights out of one of the smaller airfields in the area. Imogen wonders if the real reason for the Ground Observer Corps is that the US military would love to know how well volunteer spotters can track US bombers, in case the Soviets have ginned
