In War Times (48 page)

Sam said, “Somehow, Jill knows something about Hadntz. But I don’t know how, I don’t know how much, and she wouldn’t talk about it.”

“It’s very disturbing. And it makes me mad. Hadntz is trying to put pressure on us.”

“To do what?”

“To use it, Sam. It’s been a few years since we saw her, and at that time she told us that nuclear winter is inevitable. To tell you the truth, I’m coming across more and more people in the government—high up, generals—and officials in the CIA who would jump at the chance to use nuclear weapons. They’re hoping the Vietnam war will escalate. They want to use them there. They’ve even got very specific plans.”

Sam said, “The only problem is that we don’t have any idea
how
to use the HD. I
have
continued to distribute it. Other than that, I don’t know what to do. I kind of wish it would turn back into the device that I used to see Keenan. At least that would give me something to work with. I was under the impression that the HD10 Wink gave me at Midway would make some kind of a difference.”

“Maybe it has. Maybe that’s what he was trying to tell you.”

“If that’s so, it’s a damned disheartening difference.”

Bette smoked in silence for a few moments, then said, “I don’t know about this organic time idea. But things are pointing more and more, from what I’ve been learning at Georgetown, toward an organic model for our future. The DNA of bacteria carrying information, melded into every part of our body. I can imagine the kind of brain enhancement Hadntz described. It wouldn’t be done with just one component. But the latest brain studies show that serotonin, a brain chemical, is tremendously important for one’s mental health. Tip it one way, you’re united with the universe. You
care
—about everything, everyone. It’s the empathy thing we talked about so long ago. I mean, think about how you care about your plants. You look at one of them, think about it needing more sun, more shade, more fertilizer, and you fix it. You experiment. In the classroom, I think about the whole class as one organism. I concentrate on all of the children at once, while thinking about exactly what little piece is needed for this particular child to understand—deeply, kinesthetically—what addition is, or how they could actually use reading and writing to communicate with others. Once they’re opened up in that way, there’s no stopping them. Just think of a future, a world—Wink’s world, maybe—where this kind of understanding of the whole is embedded everywhere, optimizing opportunities, eliminating waste.”

She took a drag from her cigarette. “And if you tip the serotonin level the other way, you care less and less, until you reach the Hitler end of the scale. You care only about yourself, and your plans. You become suspicious and paranoid.”

“So it’s all chemistry.”

“Well, it’s genetics too. The way serotonin is regulated seems to have a correlation with a particular gene, VMAT2.”

“Hmmm. That’s what Wink said.”

“They’re doing research on it at the National Institutes of Mental Health. But it’s slow! The nuclear winter that the kids saw was not all that far away. And things are getting worse here.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll see.”

“We’re not children,” she said. “We can’t just
see
. We have to
do
.”

But Sam felt terribly sluggish. Or terribly,
locally
happy. He examined his happiness, the happiness of his family, their very lives, and measured it against the seemingly boundless happiness of that world where Keenan Dance still lived. His own happiness seemed much more important than continued happiness for Wink and that distant otherwhen, which intruded only to bring news of catastrophe.

Finally, he understood how the Germans had felt during the war. Do nothing. Don’t interfere. All the bad things are happening to somebody else.

But it hadn’t been true then, and it wasn’t true now. His family was deeply involved in what Hadntz had started.

“Let’s get going on the reunion, then,” he said.

“We can do that. But what can we do right now?”

“Jill said something about—what? A thinking game? What could that be?”

The next morning, after the kids left, they went through the house. They took out all the games stored under the bench in the screened-in porch. They found some very strange games, but nothing unexplainable. They made a search of the attic, again checking on the HD10, which once again appeared to be intact. That took several hours.

Finally, they got to Jill’s room.

Bette stepped across the cluttered floor gingerly. “I don’t think I lived in this kind of mess. She’s nineteen—wouldn’t you think she’d want to be a little neater?”

“She’s taking a heavy load in school, isn’t she?”

“This is a jungle. Some of these plants are monstrous,” said Bette. “I think they’re pretty nice. Look, this angel-wing begonia is in bloom.”

“Get to work, Dance. I’ll start with the closet.” She knelt and started pulling out clothing. “I need to throw this away—she doesn’t need to be wearing this raggedy plaid shirt. It would be nice to get rid of this skirt too—it’s the size of a handkerchief.”

“Bette, we’re doing something a little more important here.”

“A thinking game…a thinking game. What could it be? Every game is a thinking game, isn’t it? Maybe it’s just a deck of cards.”

Suddenly Sam remembered the board they’d been using when Ed Mach had visited them, and his fleeting impression that the board had changed as he looked at it. He hadn’t thought much of it at the time—he had just supposed his eyes were tired.

“I think we’re looking for a metal board, like a tray, with raised edges. It has legs that fold under. Like you could use it while sitting in bed.”

“That’s a lot of welcome specificity. What gives you that idea?”

“Remember when Ed was here, and they were making noise in the living room?”

“That was a while ago. Hmmm. Yeah, I guess so.” Bette’s voice was muffled. The pile of clothes, boots, and shoes behind her was getting very large.

“When I went in to see what they were up to, they were playing a board game. The surface of it…seemed very intense. It moved. Kind of like a pattern in a tile floor seems to move if you stare at it long enough.”

“Maybe that’s just what it was. A pattern.”

“Underlying, and continuously evolving, changing.” Sam was lying down and pulling things out from under the bed. It was old-fashioned and sat high off the floor. “So that’s where the broom went. I guess she wanted to make sure that the whole house looked like her room.” He sneezed when he pulled out some dusty cardboard boxes, and then a stuffed rabbit. “Bunny rabbit? Didn’t she have this when she was three?”

“Yeah,” said Bette. “Brian tore the ear off. The anguish! Come on, we have the whole house to go through.”

“Wait! I think this might be it!”

He pulled out what he recognized as the game board. “Bingo.”

She turned from the closet, pushed herself across the floor, and sat next to him, her back propped against the bed. “You think this is it?”

It was blank, just plain gray metal, except for a small black dot in the center.

“I think this says ‘touch me.’” Sam powered it on.

The surface flowed with wavering lines that seemed three-dimensional. “It’s a holographic flow analysis,” said Sam. “Amazing. We use these sometimes to observe and measure heat distribution.”

The curved, concave lines seemed to flow endlessly from two different directions, two different dimensions, then intersected, setting up new lines in a three-dimensional display that appeared to hover above the board’s surface. The lines themselves were dark green and the shimmering spaces between them were a much paler green.

“Okay,” he said. “The interference is being set up by something that the raised edges of the trays radiate. Imaged wave interference can be caused by different agents—radar, lasers.”

“Timestreams.”

“HD10’s.” Sam’s heart beat harder. “Kind of like early radar, really—except this must be extremely short-wave, with an extremely short antenna. Maybe just molecular-sized. This is…amazing. But how did it—how was it—manifested?”

“There’s something I should tell you, Sam,” said Bette.

“What?” asked Sam, his hands moving over the board, touching the varying patterns to see what would happen. “This just keeps changing and changing…”

“When I went to Germany last time, I brought back a plane.”

“You told me.”

“This is a very special plane. It’s kind of the same as this.”

Sam stopped what he was doing. “What do you mean?”

“Okay. Now you tell me. Did you put any of the HD10 in the Messerschmitt cave?”

“Are you sure you want me to tell you?”

“Sam!”

“Yes. I did. Before I had the entrance sealed off again, after Brian found that knife there.”

“Well, it mutated.”

“Into…what? A game board?”

“No, Sam. A plane. A very special plane. The CIA doesn’t know about it. But all this—Hadntz’s paper, the physics of life, all the things I’ve been learning about biochemistry, your research into fire dynamics, physics—it all seems to come together in that plane.”

“How so?”

Jill’s Army boots were in front of them. Sam looked up. She had her hands on her hips. She was very angry.

“
What
are you two doing in my room?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” asked Sam. “We were looking for this board.”

“It’s mine.”

Megan and Brian were in the doorway. Megan looped her long black hair behind her ears nervously; her face became pale. “It’s the Infinite Game Board. Jill, I thought you said it was lost.”

“Yeah,” said Brian. “You haven’t let us use it in years, you pig.”

“I think I should just move out,” said Jill. “Then I’d have some privacy.”

“With what money?” asked Sam.

“I could get a job. I could move in with Elmore.”

Bette said, “Young lady, if I ever hear—”

“Look,” said Sam. “Let’s get back to the matter at hand.” With some effort, he got off the floor, gave Bette his hand, and hoisted her up.

It had to be said. “Did you kids ever get into some…stuff…in the attic?”

They all laughed until they were almost hysterical.

“What’s so funny?” asked Sam.

Megan said, “What
else
is there in the attic?”

Brian said, “You know what they’re talking about. That plastic stuff.”

Bette sank down on the bed. “Yes. That plastic stuff.”

Megan said, “The stuff in the metal box under the floorboard under the trunk full of books?”

“Exactly,” said Sam.

“Well, yes,” said Jill. “We needed that trunk for the side of a house we were making, and we tried to move it. It was too heavy, so we took out all those books. When we moved the trunk, Megan noticed that there were new screws in the floorboards. She was reading spy books then. She thought she was going to be a spy.”

“It seemed pretty obvious that something had been very carefully hidden,” Megan said. “So I was careful about observing every little thing, like the threads that were there, and putting them back the same way.”

Bette gave Sam an exasperated look.

“We opened it up and just saw that clear stuff. It was like Jell-O, only stiffer. You could pinch off a little piece and the rest of it just relaxed, sort of, to fill up the space.”

“It was actually kind of dull,” said Megan. “Disappointing. I put it all back together the same way I’d found it.”

“I thought the box would be full of gold,” said Brian.

“I thought it would be full of old letters,” said Jill.

“So then what?” asked Sam.

“Then—nothing,” said Megan. “We never looked at it again. It seemed like a lot of trouble.”

“Did you take any of it?” asked Bette.

“No,” said Megan. “I pinched that little piece off, but then I lost it somewhere. Why? Did I ruin something?”

“No, honey,” said Sam.

“What’s that got to do with the game board?” asked Jill.

“We were wondering where you found it,” said Bette.

“We found it in the attic too,” said Brian. “I don’t remember when. After that, I guess. We found lots of toys in the attic. Old dolls, some kind of racetrack game, a really nice chess set, a baseball glove—you know, stuff like that. We made up the family that might have lived here. The ones who built the house. Made up stories about them.” He smiled as if to himself. “I’d almost forgotten. It seems like a long time ago.”

“It does,” said Jill.

“But the game board was a lot of fun,” said Megan. “Until it got scary.”

“What happened?” asked Bette.

Megan leaned against the dresser. “I don’t like to talk about it. I tried not to remember it.”

“Fires and death,” said Brian. “There were a lot of stories about war in there. I can’t remember any of them, either, exactly. They all seemed to happen so fast. Like they were happening inside your brain. And you had to make choices about what to do, and sometimes you died. But mostly, a lot of other people died. Kids, parents, old people. Everybody. Sometimes you were there when they died. Sometimes you killed them. It was kind of like playing with my green plastic soldiers when I was a kid. But a lot more…real.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sam. “I’m so sorry that you kids had to see that.”

“I’m not,” said Jill. “For one thing, it got me thinking about how to do some good. For another thing, it had the Gypsy Myra stories in it, and they’re pretty interesting. They make good comics. They help me think about how to make the world a better place.”

Sam picked up the board, which was once again blank. “We need to keep this now.”

“That’s okay,” said Megan.

“
We
won’t miss it,” said Brian, glaring at Jill.

Jill said, “No. I need it. For my Gypsy Myra comics. Look, they’re a big hit. We’re actually making money after we pay all the costs.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sam, holding the board against his chest. “Really. I’m sorry for everything.”

He went down the stairs with slow, heavy steps.

He had not felt this terrible since Pearl Harbor.

Bette put the board in “a better place.”

“Our closet?” asked Sam. “That’s a better place?”