When I was a little kid I believed the world was round, because my folks told me, and I probably heard it again in the first grade, and later in school I read about Columbus and Magellan and Sir Francis Drake and some of the early ones who went all the way around.
I suppose I believed it was one world too, but I never thought of it that way. The map shapes were all mixed up with pieces of movies, and pictures in the rotogravure section and the proportions were all wrong. I don't ever remember trying to think of it all in one piece, all at one time.
Then we went to Labrador. I helped Sam set up the automatic pilot, and we checked out of the US and flew up north toward the Pole. Quebec unrolled and the lost lakes of the north slid under, and Labrador was there, cold and blue-white and twenty-five days by dog team from anywhere.
We fished through the ice in Labrador one afternoon, and took off that night under a brilliant show of northern lights, heading east, flying around the curve of the earth for Iceland.
A radio beam from Greenland came through on time ... somewhere north lay the endless loneliness of the ice-cap ... then the Iceland beam, and the fishing boats, and the island, dreary and fogged-in and snowless.
I thought about that trip the day we went to Munich. The formations flew down across France, through the clean sky, and four miles below the world was soft and green in the sunshine.
The Alps poked up out of the haze in the south, white and jagged and endless. The Forts turned east paralleling the mountains heading into Germany.
I checked the RPM periodically, and kept an eye on the manifold pressure and gave the cylinder head temperature a quick once-over now and then, and kept looking away into Switzerland.
Over the top was Italy and the dusty roads of Rome. And south from there is the sea to the mined beaches of Libya and then Africa all the way to the Cape of Good Hope.
For the first time in my life I could begin to feel it all there. I sort of took the map off the wall and laid it flat at my feet.
France slopes down from those high white peaks, eases down across Loire to the Bay of Biscay, down through the country past Paris to the Normandy coast.
Germany, too, drops down to the sea from Bavaria to the Baltic, from the high loveliness of the Tyrol to the somber horror of Hamburg and the hungry flatness of Denmark.
Somewhere up one of those high valleys was the doomed castle of the Berchtesgaden.
If we'd stayed on the same heading we'd go over the heads of the Czechs, across the Carpathians, into the land of Comrade Stalin.
And if we stayed on that heading for a couple of days, taking it easy, stopping for vodka now and then, we'd still be in the land of Comrade Stalin. Nothing but Russia for several thousands of versts.
Down the other way to the right lay the vast mystery of West China and the Himalayas, unknown, uncharted, brooding, sleeping, buried behind fear and time and the ranges of always-white mountains.
I checked the oil pressure and tuned the RPM on the money, kept sweeping the ten-to-two o'clock sky for fighters, and pushed the projection on out into the sea.
Out there was Japan, and beyond that for miles of blue time the Pacific. Swing south through the atolls and archipelagos to the land of the moon maidens and lotus blossoms, and foxholes.
Somewhere lost in all that ocean was Australia, Christmas Isle, Easter Isle, Tahiti, Oahu. They were all out there somewhere, and some day maybe I'd see them all.
And out of the currents and crosscurrents would come the yellow beaches of California growing into North America, from the lazy Mexican love songs of Ensenada to the hot and heavy power song of Detroit and Pittsburgh and Manhattan.
I've hitchhiked across it, and flown over most of it, and skied down parts of it and been pulled over some of it in a little red wagon.
I didn't have time for South America or India or the penguins down in Antarctica, because the formation was weaving around some flak and Sam wanted 2300 RPM.
"Snap out of it," he said. "Get your mind on this."
But I'd made it all the way round.
And someway there was a change. After that, I could think of each country, each island, each continent in its relationship with the others. One world, the land lying in the sea, and all of it, the land masses, and the oceans, covered by the great shifting air masses and currents of the air ocean.
The map shapes were out of the atlas and placed where they belonged, flat and full-sized and enormous.
I kept coming back to the thought of it throughout the trip. It seemed like such a big world, one great big world, that will never be worth a ******n as a world until it is tied together so it functions as one world.
Parts of the world have been floating around in the ocean, getting by alone for quite a while, but some of the other pieces haven't been doing so well.
They say Anzio was lovely once, and the terns of Ascension Island could lay their eggs where they pleased in the old days. But in the end they were moved in on. In the end the isolated parts have to give to the others or be given or take or be taken.
Some people have been dreaming of one big world for a long time and doing their best to make it come true. Willkie went all the way round in a Liberator and wrote his book. And Marco Polo wandered all the way to China, and then came back to tell about it. And the nameless hooded Jesuits sailed out across all the oceans to spread the word of a man who believed in all the people, wherever they lived, black or white or variations of yellow, sick or hurt or perfectly healthy. Aryan or not quite, with a little bit of Gypsy.
We dropped our bombs near Munich and turned off the target back for England. As deep as I could see into Germany the sky was stained with smoke from the targets, scattered around smashed and missing and burning.
Maybe boundary lines have their uses, and tariffs and visas and all the other barriers built up by men on the ground, but the air flows smoothly over them and from 20,000 it is pretty hard to see them or any very good reason for them.
With a few stops for gas we could fly our B-17 over all the little roped-off states and spheres on influence, and local districts of domination.
We could wave at the people and buzz in low and make the roofs flap in the prop wash, and pull up and do lazy eights over the town hall, or stay up at 20,000 and line up the cross hairs on the local steel mill or opera house and watch the bombs drop away.
And while the little kids waved at us their houses would topple and the lights would go out, and the bomb dust would strangle the living air.
We were going home. Home is where the props stop spinning. I looked around, very tired. From up there it all looked so green and beautiful, and what we had done so sort of horrible.
We got our first look at fighters on that Munich haul. There were ring-around-the-roses on all sides of us part of the time.
"Hell of a scramble out at nine o'clock," Crone called up.
We couldn't tell 109's from P-51's or Focke-Wulfs. We couldn't tell which side was winning or what kind went down. They looked like they were playing around, and then one broke off in a dive that ended when he hit the ground.
"Jesus!" Sharpe said. "Did you see that?"
The explosion died away to a bloody glow. Somebody was dead down there.
All the way in from the Rhine it was like that.
"Somebody just crashed down there," Sharpe said a few minutes later.
Crone said, "I saw him, looked like a P-51."
"It was an ME-109," Spaugh said positively.
"There goes another one," Spaugh said.
A few of them were getting through the fighter cover to the Forts, the wings ahead of us on the road in got all the business. Every few minutes we'd see a Fort peel off, maybe trailing smoke, maybe not, heading for Switzerland.
"Christ, there goes a Fort!" said Sam.
I only saw the pieces fluttering down through the straggling flame.
Another Fort pointed down into a shallow dive and never came out of it.
"Three chutes," Crone said. "I saw three."
The fighters never got to us. The 47's and 51's and 38's kept moaning over, some going home, some going up ahead for a little in-fighting.
It also seemed to me like his biggest problem was simply getting used to the lag between the throttles and the response on such a big plane - Considering how little time those guys had when shipped overseas (60 hours and change), that's not a surprise at all.
