In War Times (15 page)

The man holding the torch helped him up with his free arm. “You’re all right. Good.” He squinted at Sam. “What day is it?”

“March first, 1944.”

“All right, then.”

“Wait!” he called as the man turned to leave. “The basement.”

“Nobody here but you. We’ve checked.”

Sam got to his feet, heaved his bag onto his shoulder, and walked through the shell of the dark house. His head ached; he brushed his hair with one hand, dislodging plaster that rained to the floor. A fire flared briefly in the ballroom, and he saw, then, that there were no dead bodies, no evidence of habitation, not a stick of furniture, even burnt. He appeared to be in an abandoned house. He touched his head. It was sticky with blood.

He pulled out his own torch and checked his watch: 11:43
P.M.

His chest constricted in panic. What had happened? Where had they all gone? How did they get here in the first place? Hadntz had said that it was not easy to find him. Were they all in…some different place? Or was this some kind of new vengeance weapon devised by Hitler’s scientists, one that removed people and left usable property behind?

He recalled his sensation of being cut out of his own time and inserted into Hadntz’s. It had not seemed radically different, but maybe it was. Perhaps that scene simply coincided with a scene from his time, the way that two different scales might frame the same note in modern jazz, giving it a different nuance in each instance, a whole different past, presaging a different tonal future.

Had he dreamt the whole episode? Had he drunk too many ales, stumbled into this empty house to sleep it off?

But no. No. Here in his pocket. The microfilm.

Something…had worked.

I
N THE END
, it wasn’t necessary to pilfer a cavity magnetron using the complicated system of trades and payoffs set up by Wink.

They were unpacking and organizing ordnance when Sam, having pried the lid off a crate that purportedly contained engine blocks, whistled. “Take a look at this.”

Wink set his clipboard on the crate he was tallying and looked over Sam’s shoulder. “Magnetrons?” His shoulders slumped. He was the picture of disappointment. “This takes all the fun out of it.”

Sam cleared a space on top of a crate and began lifting them out, one by one. “Heavy.” Their copper interior and permanent magnets gave them a bit of heft.

“Come on. They can’t weigh more than a few pounds.”

“You could help.”

Eleven cavity magnetrons soon stood on the crate. Each eight-holed copper disk was sandwiched between metal squares. Wires spiraled around the core, then twisted outward, leaving their tight circle for a more relaxed arc, like tendrils searching for something to latch on to.

Sam searched in vain for paperwork. “Who do you suppose these belong to?” Wink took another delicate, savoring sip of the Mountbatten whisky, pilfered from a stone building on the edge of the estate by Wink’s friends, the paratroopers, swirling it in his moonlight-acquired snifter, which he kept with the bottle on a shelf, hidden by heavy, greasy machine parts that no one would have any use for. “I guarantee you that somebody is going to want this whole shipment. However, considering that it’s top-secret, I really don’t understand how they’re to be distributed. So we’re going to borrow one and see how it works on our…device, and then use it in one of the M-9’s when the rest of the parts get here.”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” said Sam. And it did. He could not help wondering whether Hadntz, knowing of their dilemma, and possibly disappointed in his progress so far, had somehow managed to steer this shipment his way by using her government contacts. He would not have been surprised.

It was about 2
A.M.
The wireless gave news of a victory at Saipan, after a horrific naval battle with the Japanese.

Sam paused in his work, trying to shake the images of obliterated battleships, the blood and thunder of battle, the perfect, unique individual lives that were suddenly gone forever. His heart took a few skipping beats. He could not help thinking of Keenan, trapped in the sunken
Arizona
. Had he found an air pocket, which ran out? Had he been killed instantly, on impact?

He forced himself to resume his painstaking task beneath a large magnifying glass he had wired over his workbench. He hunched forward on his stool. Nearby, at the airstrip, planes took off; landed. The space around him smelled of diesel fuel, stale coffee, and Wink’s careful daily allotment of what he now referred to as His Lordship’s Drink. Wink slapped down cards on a crate, playing his perpetual game of solitaire, having completed his work on a chemical bath through which electricity would flow.

No one bothered them here; they’d built a private little shed in one corner of the vast garage and also used it for music practice, the noise of which discouraged visitors and encouraged imprecations and good-natured derision; comments about stampeding wild animals and the elephants which must be hidden within. “A goddamned circus,” Wink told Jake. “It’s a whole different world in there. God’s truth.”

Sam wasn’t sure that the bomb impacts he thought he heard outside were real or imagined; the concussion he’d suffered in London had various side effects, including sleeplessness.

They had spent many hours comparing the two papers—Hadntz’s original, and the microfilm version—but it seemed as if the original had been stretched and changed in so many ways that they just gave up and started all over again, figuring that whatever she had done, Sam’s strange experience proved that something, at least, had happened, and probably due to her changes.

Sam soldered what he hoped was the final wiring connection and stifled a yawn. “Ready?”

Wink shrugged and moved a stack of cards to another stack. Later, recalling the scar on Wink’s forehead and how it got there, he decided that Wink might have the flaw of always erring on the impetuous side.

Sam flipped the toggle switch that gave it power.

The apparatus hummed. Current flowed through a large rectangular pan, which was about four inches deep. Across the top was soldered an arc of new material, Plexiglas, which came from the gun turret of a B-17 that had exploded while on the runway with a full load of ordnance. A pump with a pressure regulator was attached by a thin pipe. Inside the pan was the liquid Wink had painstakingly distilled in a series of chemical processes described in the paper. As it turned out, the radium from the watch dials, the residue in the retorts, and the silicon Sam had picked up in the warehouse had all been necessary; Sam supposed that his repeated readings of the paper had helped him in his seemingly serendipitous choices.

He and Wink leaned over the metal table. The visible wires glowed, emitting a small, rainbowed spectrum that Sam saw reflected from his hand and from Wink’s face when he looked up and they stared at each other.

“What’s happening?” asked Wink.

“I can’t tell. Give it a little more oxygen.”

“I foresee the strong possibility of bugs.”

Nothing much happened for about an hour. Wink went back to his solitaire game, but Sam continued to watch the liquid through the dome. “Look!”

“Are these…lines? Crystals forming? Is it turning into a solid?”

“I don’t think so. They’re certainly delicate-looking.”

“Like wires. Different elements precipitating into these forms, I guess…they’re all different colors.”

“Changing colors.”

“Like a kaleidoscope.”

“And changing shapes too.”

“Three-dimensional.”

“Maybe more. She describes dimensions that we can’t see. Not yet.”

“Hell,” said Wink. “Must be the whisky.”

“What?”

“Pictures. I see pictures.”

“I don’t. But I hear music.”

“Yeah. But pretty faint.” Wink bent down, pressed his ear to the Plexiglas.

Sam laughed. “Gotcha! Music from the hall. It’s Saturday night.”

“What in God’s name are we doing here, then?”

“Not much, as far as I can tell,” Sam said, walking around one side to check a connection. “But I don’t think this is from the dance hall.”

“There seems to be this…jelly forming here.” Wink bent down to look inside the shining contraption.

Sam said, “Do you hear music now?”

Wink said, “Yeah. Definitely not from the dance hall. ‘Koko.’” What they’d heard Parker and Gillespie play in Harlem. “But there’s something different…different pianist, I think. Plus a bass.”

“Maybe we’ve created a radio.”

“But what would we be picking up?” They’d heard no recordings resembling modern jazz so far, and did not really expect to, because of the continuing musician’s strike—and it could be that Parker and Gillespie would not be popular even if they were recorded. No one else in the Perham Downs had any idea of what they were trying to do, and local revelers didn’t appreciate undanceable music, even if it was played well, which it wasn’t.

The music, faint already, faded. After a moment, Wink said, “What the hell. We were hallucinating.”

“Both of us? Hey!” He saw a spark and reached for the switch.

In the moment before the explosion, he thought he heard “Koko,” as loud and clear as if he were standing next to a musician he could never hope to emulate, the tones an exquisitely controlled transportation system to ecstasy. During the explosion, he thought of Kandinsky’s flying-outward lines, heading from a nucleus of utter darkness—the magnetron itself, but more than that: time, emanating with such speed that this present caught him, created him, informed him intimately in every cell and in every thought and action. After the explosion, it seemed, once again, that he was in paradise—summer at Puzzle River, infinite fields of tall green corn, a sweaty baseball glove on his hand, the sting of catching a hardball—until he realized that Wink was dragging him across the concrete floor.

They managed to contain the resulting fire, just barely. They stood, breathing heavily, in a warehouse that now stank of smoke as well as oil.

“Can we put this down to just another strafing run?” asked Wink.

The device was black, melted, ruined—except for the cavity magnetron, which they were able to retrieve and burnish after the mess had cooled.

“Back to square one,” said Wink.

Feeling deeply weary, Sam examined the blackened object.

It had the irregular shape of a small cow pie. It seemed opaque at first, but now that it had cooled, it had a hard, ceramic-like finish, like dulled obsidian.

Sam lifted it from the floor and put it on the workbench. It seemed heavier than it ought to be. All in all, it resembled some kind of artifact found after a bombing raid, objects of twisted and melted metal which, shorn of their original purpose, demanded a new way of thinking about them, a fresh method of observation, if one were to use them again.

Its reflective surface was suggestive, all potential, as if it could burst into life, might once again come alive with music. Holding it between his hands, Sam had the fleeting sense that some kind of circuit had been completed, a movement of as yet unnamed subatomic particles, and decided that it was just a sensation brought on by having studied Hadntz’s detailed speculations for so long.

He shoved it to the back of the workbench, with all the bolts and wrenches. No one would notice it.

A week later, he and Wink went to the Ordnance Club to eat.

Wink said, “What’s on the menu today? Specialty of the house—bacon sandwich. Just like yesterday and the day before.” The “bacon” was a thick slice of raw pig fat. The bread was genuine enough, though thin.

“Do I have Dance and Winklemeyer here?” The British voice behind them sounded official, as all Brits did, save Cockneys. It was their accent.

They looked at each other. There was no way out. They turned and saw a British major.

“Gentlemen, come with me.”

Major Bedwick seated himself behind an imposing desk, folded his hands, and hunched forward. “I have been hearing things about you.”

“Good things, sir, I hope,” said Wink. He was ignored.

“It seems that a particular American soldier, Ray Johanson, has been seen leaving the hospital in his robe and going to your quarters.”

“Which we do share with a good many people.”

“After which he emerges clothed in a uniform with a pass to the club, where he meets his girlfriend.”

“Sounds like just what the doctor ordered,” said Wink.

“Yes, well, the rumor is, like the rumor about the whisky that vanished from the Mountbatten private stock, is that you may have had something to do with this arrangement.”

They were both silent.

“The point is that you are schemers.” He pushed back his chair and began to pace the room with hands clasped behind his back. “You are capable of manipulating the system to your advantage.”

Wink said, “Sir, we are simply bringing our Yankee ingenuity to bear on the many different crosses that one must bear in wartime, to boost morale and keep everything running smoothly.”