In War Times (13 page)

“How long are we going to need the magnetron? Maybe we could just shift them between the 584 and the device. Rotate them.”

“Since we don’t know what this is going to do or how long it’s going to take, I’m not sure that’s feasible. We might interrupt some process that would have to start over every time we removed the magnetron.”

“Hmmm. I met some guys who might help. Bunch of paratroopers. The ones who don’t wash. They’re eating trout with drawn butter tonight, pheasant tomorrow night, and traded a few leftover boar roasts with Company B last week, all from Mountbatten’s estate. Apparently they hunt and fish and help themselves to the earl’s property as they please.”

“So how would they get a magnetron?”

“Sort of the same way they’re getting the chemicals. It would be complicated. So complicated that we wouldn’t be blamed, and they don’t care if they are. Although for them just getting one would probably be child’s play. Fun.”

“Just so long as no one gets shot.”

“They don’t have to shoot these guys. That’s accomplished by the Germans, almost guaranteed. We just push them out of planes behind enemy lines.”

Sam braced himself as the train to London halted. Outside, somber ochre fields were fringed with the upward strokes of ancient trees, black along fencelines, and scattered with yellowed sheep.

“Shall we help?”

Wink dropped the window open and thrust his head and shoulders outside, then fell back into his seat and closed the window, muffling the clank of machinery and shouts of men as they removed the section of bombed track.

“They’re covered.”

Rails twisted by bombs were removed and replaced, to be melted and recast. The trains were delayed, but it was a commonplace inconvenience, taken care of by the efficient Brits.

Wink relaxed into his seat, able to make it look as comfortable as a leather club lounger. The train jerked forward and chuffed Londonward once again.

They were the only soldiers to get off at their station. While crossing a tiny park, they heard a man hold forth on the evils of Churchill and of Parliament, preaching from a bench to no one in particular. Sam doubted that anyone was ever converted, even though Uncle Joe Stalin was now an ally and sucking down American war supplies with terrific appetite. England tolerated a much wider array of political views than America, though. Mrs. Dibdon, who recorded Sam’s hoggin chits at her Mountbatten cottage and whose father was a lifelong Mountbatten butler, kept a large, glass-covered portrait of Stalin above her altar, and a keg of tragically cold beer for herself and the soldiers.

They walked to Schmidt’s. The homely smell of sauerkraut hit them as they opened the door; the murmur of the civilian crowd rose and fell, and there was not another uniform in sight.

After dinner, they met Cindy, Wink’s current London girlfriend, and some of her companions, for a night on the town. Transportation was Cindy’s Mini.

As he had regarded it from the sidewalk, the Mini was smallest car Sam had ever seen, yet here he was in the backseat, a girl on either side and one on his lap. After an awkward moment she leaned back against him and managed to get an arm around his neck. “Might as well be comfortable. I’m June.”

June’s blond hair was cut in a bob below her ears. Her tiny red hat, anchored by a pearl-ended hatpin, matched her lipstick. The seams of her nylons, Sam had noticed as they stood outside the car negotiating seats, were the tiniest bit crooked, probably drawn on with an eyebrow pencil.

Wink’s girl was driving too fast, given that she had little light to see by. All the women in England seemed to drive too fast. She glanced at Wink every thirty seconds until one of the girls said, “Watch the road, Cindy.”

June said, “We’re going to a place like the Crystal Palace, Yank. That’s gone now. Burned down. Not by the war. Same thing, though. Like one’s childhood has big gaps. I remember going there as a little girl, palm trees above my head and light streaming through. Good clothes, forbidden to run. I did anyway. Fell into a pot of something or other.”

“Built just for the Queen’s jubilee, right?” said Wink.

“Blood-sucking royals,” said Sam, reminded of Mrs. Dibdon’s unvarying description of her employer, Lord Mountbatten.

“No, I think they were bird-of-paradise,” said June. All the girls laughed. Their various scents filled the car. Sam was reminded of his sisters. And then of his brother.

“Why so quiet, Yank?”

“Oh, he’s just that way,” Wink said.

“
He
makes up for it,” said Sam.

The windows of their dance venue, a huge hall of glass reminiscent, as June had said, of the Crystal Palace, were painted black. Inside, a moderately good swing band played, and the thousand-strong crowd of British and American soldiers, WAVES, WACS, and WRENS, danced and drank with great energy, roaring with conversation and emitting clouds of cigarette smoke. June’s little hat stayed tilted on her head as they danced, both slow and fast.

Around nine, the air-raid signal sounded. Sam, Wink, and Cindy wanted to stay. “This is a good band,” protested Cindy, her arm around Wink’s waist. But the other girls insisted that they find a shelter. As they hurried down the dark street with scuffling crowds, hearing bursts of laughter from time to time or someone calling out a name, a building not a block ahead of them collapsed in a wave of dust and rubble. Sam heard a child scream.

They ran across the street with the rest of the crowd. A fire blazed in the shattered building. Sam followed the screams, choking on dust and smoke, pulling on his leather gloves. A shrieking boy was trapped beneath a pile of bricks.

The heat was unbearable. Sam tossed bricks with ferocious speed. The boy’s pants were on fire. Sam freed him at last, and carried him past the growing fire, over piles of rubble, and out of the building. He set him down on the sidewalk and a man with a water bucket doused the flame on his pants. Looking at the black mess that had been the boy’s leg, Sam felt sick. A woman rushed up and knelt beside him, crying, “Bobby! Oh, Bobby!”

Sam went back to his group. June made much of him.

“Bloody goddamned Germans,” said Wink, his face bathed in firelight.

“Sappers coming through,” hollered someone behind them, and then the professionals were there.

Without discussing it, they went into the first pub they saw and found a table. “Sorry about the cold beer,” said the waitress as she set pints on the table. “It’s the war.”

The next morning, they were up fairly early, considering, and visited Schmidt’s once again, for lunch.

“I’ll take Howie’s lead,” said Sam, as they stood on a chilly corner after being fortified with steaks. One bone of contention between the Brits and the Yanks was that the Yanks were paid so much more than the British soldiers that they could afford such luxuries, and could therefore attract more women.

Wink threw down his cigarette butt and scuffed it out with his boot. “You would.”

Sam knew that he didn’t really care. Wink would be happy trying to find the chemicals they needed. “Well, I’ve got the letter.”

Howie had wrangled a letter that authorized Sam to take what he needed for the war effort, with a warning not to abuse it. “This does not mean that you are entitled to rare folios or jewelry.”

“I wouldn’t know a rare folio if it bit me.”

Sam stood on the threshold of a great, dim warehouse, an ancient and vast storehouse of time. This place had, according to Howie, housed theater paraphernalia for longer than the United States had been in existence.

He closed the heavy door, which was framed by massive hand-hewed timbers. Wide flooring planks had settled into a mildly rolling floor for unbridled, profligate objects of all descriptions that loomed in semi-darkness.

A ten-foot-high fireplace surround and mantel, fashioned of some dark wood, leaned against other tall, flat objects shuffled like cards into a mixture of grand wrought-iron gates and finely carved headboards. A long row of tables, as different from one another as a pack of mongrel dogs, stretched away to his right. A wash of yellow light splashed down the corridor that led to the heart of the place.

He headed toward the light. He needed a guide, someone who spoke the language in this country of ancient, well-used objects. To his relief, when he rounded the corner, he saw a man hunched over a high desk with several open ledger books spread out atop a mound of papers.

“May I help you, sir?”

“I’m from the U.S. Army.”

“That’s news.” He did not look up.

“I have this letter.” He pulled it from the interior breast pocket of his jacket and handed it to the man. It was improbably crisp, and rustled as he unfolded it. The man took it, squinted.

“I see. I’m Edwards. I’ll see what I can do.”

Sam followed him out into the dimness. As they trudged up six flights of open stairs, Sam could see down into cubicles filled with time embodied in matter and measured off in square feet; stacked, horizontal planes of time. Perhaps time was really like this: ever-opening rooms, like a vast apartment building, but extending into dimensions that they presently could not see…

“We might find something you could use here,” said Edwards.

Sam hoped so; they were on the top floor, with their chances of finding something accordingly diminished. The smell of time—spicy, dusty, oily, and just plain dirty—was giving him a headache.

Edwards pushed his way through some fairly new art deco side chairs toward a row of huge, rococo radios. “I’m not sure but that they’ve already been looted; after all, we don’t need working models. But it comes in by the truckload and something could definitely be overlooked.”

Sam and Edwards examined the radios, shoving and pulling them about, before finding one with actual innards.

“This looks promising.” Sam took a screwdriver from a pocket and removed the back. He relieved the mahogany cabinet of tubes, wires, dials, crystal, brackets—anything remotely useful. These he could use to create a dedicated environment in which to produce Hadntz’s Device, or modify and recast to fulfill an entirely different function from that for which it had been created. He put them all into his duffel and carefully replaced the back of the radio, kneeling on dusty floorboards, as Edwards watched.

He descended the stairs behind Edwards, feeling as if he had not found anything he really needed. Pausing at the third floor, he asked, “Mind if I look around here a bit?”

“Suit yourself. Don’t have a spare torch.”

“I’ve got one.”

After passing what seemed like a mile of hanging clothing, he came across a tall shelf stocked with someone’s ancient mineral collection, and then things more recent. He collected three watches with glowing radium dials; his inventor’s brain insisted on them. He found a rock labeled U-235 on a little stand beneath a bell jar, and three retorts of various sizes, each with a mysterious residue on the bottom, and rocks of clay sediment. He picked up one of the rocks and trained his torch on it, just able to discern that it was veined with the channels used by primitive life to form itself, according to Hadntz’s paper, which seemed to contain all manner of speculation. Perhaps this might be a template for the circuits he was trying to invent.