460
PARTISAN REVIEW
red as any blood in the snow, but always I came back, without trying, to
the calm ocean and the berg, with the pack-ice around the base of it,
giving that light, just-invented blue color at me, keeping my paddle out
of the water. That was the afternoon.
The blue-black at the end of the pipe left me, little by little, and
even the circle of the pipe, at least as far as my being able to see it was
concerned. I would give it another hour by my watch, and then poke
my head out and see if I could pick up Polaris.
I didn't make it to the end of the pipe, or at least not right then.
The whole thing squeezed together all at once, from all sides but espe–
cially the top, and drove my eardrums back into my head, pushed toward
each other by some big quick clamp, like earphones coming together a
hundred times harder than they were supposed to. There was a sound
when this happened, but my head hurt so much from the in-driving on
my drums that I didn't remember it until later. It was a big thump,
though, one that was in the air, most likely; was made out of air, but
had body to it; a lot of body, just for a second. The pipe shook with it;
the water going past me sloshed. It happened again. I sucked on my
tongue - what I would have done in the aircraft when we changed alti–
tudes - and started to crawl. It was not Polaris I was looking for now:
those were explosions. "Come on," I said, crawling hard . "Come on.
Let them have it. More . All you got." And then, "Let
me
have it." There
in the shit-pipe, heading for the outside to stay out, I called that fire
down; I did all I could, from where I was.
I got out and stood up, and looked back inland . There was a low
red glow, very wide, with some white in it. I hadn't even straightened
up when four or five more bombs hit, all in a line and spaced more or
less even with each other. The line must have covered at least a mile, and
right away the fire went wider, and a lot higher. There was already
smoke, though the docks, at least my part of them, hadn't been hit.
But there were people on them, and I wasn't used to that, at
night. They were running back and forth amongst the cranes, and in
between the bombs I could hear them screaming and gabbling. That was
the way I wanted it, sure enough, and I took off across the field toward
the fire, running easy.
