The last quartet of this particular mission buzzed across the width of the island, and January dropped four more pebbles, aiming for crevices in the pile. January had observed hundreds of B-29s roar off the four parallel runways of the north field and head for Japan. From Mount Lasso they had an overview of the whole island, from the harbor at Wall Street to the north field in Harlem. He wandered away, back to the cairn he had been building. January, who was thirty-seven, didn't go for it. The rest of the crew were all in their mid-twenties like Fitch, and they liked the captain's bossy roughhouse style. Fitch was a bulky youth, thick-featured, pig-eyed-a thug, in January's opinion. "He's best because I make him be best, right, Professor?" "That's why he's the best," Matthews joked. He passed the flask on to Lieutenant Matthews, their navigator. He could drink it any way he pleased up here, out from under the eye of the group psychiatrist. Anyone who read more than the funnies was Professor to Fitch. "Practicing your bombing up here, eh, Professor?'' January wandered over and took the flask. The others grouped near Captain Fitch, who passed around his battered flask. What Captain January thought of the development he didn't say. When their pilot Jim Fitch joined them it became an official pastime, like throwing flares into the compound or going hunting for stray laps. Captain January had gotten sick of it, and after he lit out for the hilltop a few times some of his crewmates started trailing him.
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The men of the 509th had played a million hands of poker, sitting in the shade of a palm around an upturned crate sweating in their skivvies, swearing and betting all their pay and cigarettes, playing hand after hand after hand, until the cards got so soft and dog-eared you could have used them for toilet paper. It was a mindless pastime, but so was poker.
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The largest cairn had four hundred stones in it.
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In July of 1945 on Tinian island in the North Pacific, Captain Frank January had taken to piling pebble cairns on the crown of Mount Lasso-one pebble for each B-29 takeoff, one cairn for each mission. You may also be interested in Kim Stanley Robinson's related story, " A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions" (external link). It has been selected and introduced for us this week by Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson. This week's story was first published in Universe 14 (ed.