In War Times (11 page)

Wintertime England was everything that Sam expected—cold and rainy, a land of plentiful pubs. Knocked-down trees and cars up on blocks were scattered throughout the fields, intended as obstacles to the inevitable German invasion.

The train station had recently been bombed. The vicar’s garden had a ragged crater in its center, and he had an ill-kept secret plan to landscape his “vicar’s crater” for reference in postwar Memorial Day sermons. A pilot of local legend named Bellingham, who died in an encounter with a Messerschmitt the week before the 610th arrived, had a month earlier shot down a German reconnaissance flight over the town. Two Germans had survived, and were in the local hospital under heavy guard, protected from injury at the hands of the Poles and Czechs in the RAF unit. By all accounts, they were treated like weekend guests at a house party, were insufferably arrogant, and predicted a quick end to the war, in their favor.

When American soldiers walked down the street they were followed by children asking “Got some gum, chum?” When a woman in the Hart and Hind said to Jimmy “The Mess,” in parting, “Keep your pecker up,” she was puzzled by the resulting hilarity. Even after they found that this meant, “Keep a stiff upper lip,” the soldiers never failed to be amused. “Knock me up,” was another phrase frequently used by young women; it meant “Give me a call,” not what it meant stateside.

Nearby, an old country estate was home to children evacuated from London. It was run by a breezy and incredibly good-natured young woman named Elsinore, whom Sam met at the pub. She put off all manner of soldiers and fliers as regularly as they identified her as good matrimonial material. This was, according to her, the minute they saw her easy facility with children.

“It’s all this death.” Her bobbed hair was dark and her eyes were dark too, in the dim light of the Hart and Hind. “They imagine themselves as happily married and me as the loving mother of their children and of course they will each have bloody four, no less.” She laughed over her Down and Putny’s Red Ale, her second since Sam had introduced himself and joined her at a small round table. “It will be a cold day in Bermuda before they catch me and I don’t think I’ll be having those children at all, thank you.”

Sam did not propose, but regularly walked, in his few spare hours, through the winter garden and up the imposing stone steps of the estate with chocolates and tins of his mother’s cookies for the children. “You needn’t try to butter me up,” Elsinore would say. But Sam liked sitting among the children, helping them tie their shoelaces or do their schoolwork, though he was less than helpful when it came to British spelling. It reminded him of home. Mrs. Applewhist, a thin, sixtyish woman from the village, also helped in the manor, but was somewhat suspicious of Sam for a good long while.

Wink thought he was nuts. “They’re unbearably loud, rude brats. They kick and bite. Hard. Like wild ponies. And their noses run.”

Sam’s feelings were hurt by this assessment, as if the children were his own. “They’re homesick and want their mothers.”

“No reason why they can’t learn to wipe their own noses. No kids for me.”

Though he didn’t want word to get around, for fear of being asked to do something tiring, Wink was by far the most athletic of the company. He’d been on the varsity football squad during his first year of college. Sometimes he disappeared to return drenched in sweat. When someone asked, he’d wiggle his eyebrows and say, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” The truth was that he’d been out running along the deep, narrow English lanes. Considering the extent to which Sam went in order to avoid being assigned any physical work, he found this completely voluntary and unnecessary activity a sign of insanity. Wink said it cleared his mind.

The only truly unpleasant character in the outfit was Belcher, a burly guy from Cleveland who complained day in and day out that he had joined to be a paratrooper and was being unfairly kept from combat, and who became more and more sullen the more money Wink took off of him at poker. The pathological liar of the company, Homset, was of course utterly charming and harmless once you knew you couldn’t trust a word he said. He had two wives back home and was having a hard time sending both of them money, especially with girlfriends in London to entertain. Sam noticed that an odd trait of pathological liars seemed to be that they believed every word that the other fellow uttered. Jimmy “The Mess” Messner, Earl T., and Kocab, the company magician, were still with them as well, good drinking buddies and always ready to help out in a pinch.

As he and Wink set up the compound, Sam realized that they were creating the perfect place to try to build the device. He was living in a mechanic’s dream, with machine and woodworking and automotive shops all around. The Yanks, like the British flyboys from the nearby airstrip, were self-starting and disdainful of authority, so Sam was well able to have anything built that he felt like having built. If he had brought in plans for a Rube Goldberg-type perpetual motion machine they would have built it; they would have built him a goddamned rocket ship.

Sam and Wink cordoned off one corner of a Quonset hut as an administrative office. Their desks, which doubled as drawing boards, were supported by packing crates; their workbench was a twelve-foot-long assembly of planks supported by two-by-fours, which quickly grew littered with greasy bolts, vacuum tubes, and M-9 components they were troubleshooting.

Wink headed off for a few hours of relaxation at the Hart and Hind after each twelve-hour shift. “What say we hoist a few,” he’d say, flinging his jacket over his shoulder, standing expectantly at the end of Sam’s footlocker.

At first, Sam agreed. But after a few such evenings, he saw his chance.

“I’m going to rest. Maybe I’m coming down with something.”

“Elsinore will be there.”

“Give her my regards. Maybe you can volunteer to take care of the kids.”

After Wink left, Sam opened his footlocker and extracted a page from Hadntz’s paper. He kept her folder with his composition books filled with letters to Keenan. With paper in hand, he walked through the tunnel to the Quonset hut.

Joe Kocab was there, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. He waved to Sam from across the shop and yelled, “Got those bolts machined today.”

“Great,” said Sam. “About time to knock off, isn’t it?”

“Long past. I’m off to the H and H.”

Sam set his page next to his drawing board. Sliding his T-square up and down the piece of paper he’d taped to the board, he used his triangles and pencil to render a precise mechanical drawing of one view of the device. As was the process in rendering many mechanical drawings, he had to deduce some of the measurements. Once he was finished with the drawing he’d have to go over it carefully to make sure that he’d created no discrepancies.

Absorbed in his work, Sam was startled to hear Wink say, from over his shoulder, “Got a burst of energy, eh?” Then he looked down at Sam’s drawing. “What the hell is that?” He punched Sam on the arm. “Damn. That looks complicated. You some kind of spy after all?”

Sam picked up his brush and swept eraser crumbs from the drawing. He compared it to Hadntz’s specifications. “Look the same to you?”

Wink studied it for a moment. “Yeah. But—”

“Think we can make it?”

“No sweat. Kocab’s a genius. What is it, though?”

“I’ve got a lot more drawings to do before it will be ready.” He carefully untaped his drawing. “I’ll give this to Kocab tomorrow.”

“Look, Dance. What is this part of?”

“I’ve been meaning to show you.”

It took Wink three nights to make it through the paper. They sat together in their office, Sam on his stool drawing, and Wink reading.

Finally, on the third night, at around two in the morning, Wink slid the papers back into the folder. “You think this will work?”

Sam straightened on his stool to ease his aching back. “If it works, what do you think it will do?”

“She thinks it will change history. Cause us to mutate into better folks somehow.”

“Anything more specific?”

Wink lighted a cigarette and began to pace. “Not much that I could put into words of my own, words that aren’t hers. Who is Dr. Eliani Hadntz? I gather she’s a member of the scientific establishment in Europe.”

“The Army put me in a course, back in Washington, just before the war started, with different lecturers. She was one. Russian, by way of Hungary.”

“What were the lectures for?”

“Never told us. But the science was cutting-edge.” He filled Wink in on what he knew about the course, and about Hadntz. He didn’t mention the sex.

When he finished, Wink was deep in thought. “Maybe she stole the plans.”

“Possibly. But I don’t think so.”

“She some kind of spy?”

“I’ve been interviewed by security people a couple of times and I get the impression she’s on our side. Or maybe her own side. A new side. I don’t know where she is now, though.”

“When did she give this to you?”

“December sixth.”

“The quantum nature of consciousness, eh?”

“Well, our brains, which appear to generate consciousness, are composed of physical matter.”

“Right.”

“So the laws of physics inherent in matter are inherent in our brains and every cell of our bodies as well.”

“Yeah, sure.” Wink shuffled through the papers. “I found this stuff absolutely fascinating.”

“So maybe your year of premed will help?”

Wink shrugged. “I hated medicine. I wasn’t the best student. But I know enough to recognize that these are some strange…speculations, here. I mean, who in hell would dream that genes take this particular shape? Anyway, we’re going to need some chemicals. I think I can rustle them up. Got a few contacts already. I love experiments.” He tapped the tiny scar above his right eye. “Got this when I blew up one of Dad’s labs.”

“You told me. You’ve got the credentials.”

“Damn right. I’m impetuous, foolhardy, play a mean jazz violin, and I’m an all-around great guy.”

“So you’re in.”

“Well, sure. Otherwise you’d have to kill me.”

Or somebody would. Sam wasn’t supposed to know anything about Hadntz’s paper, either.

As Sam had the metal components machined, he kept the parts of the device well separated, as if they might join together in the night like magnets and win the war for the Germans. He was superstitious of it in this regard. Everyone knew that the Nazis were very much ahead of the game when it came to science. If Hadntz
was
working for the Germans…but no. She was teaching real physics in the United States. Why give this information to a soldier in the U.S. Army if that was the case?

But why him, anyway? He could not answer that, except that Hadntz had been in a hurry to rescue her daughter, and she had liked him, and had no other choice. That night of sex and physics might prove to be his luck, his damnation, or just a great puzzle with which to while away the war. He might have been able to think that this was simply a wild theory she wanted to test, except that during that week of instruction she’d seemed the epitome of sharp intelligence.

Magnification was needed to solder the wiring, which was of a new and ingenious design. As Sam worked, late at night in a corner of the blacked-out engine-testing hut, he realized that the thing he was making would be capable of serving as a platform for an infinite number of computations.

Wink continued to be full of surprises. He spoke fluent German, thanks to his grandmother, who never learned English, and was sometimes called down to the POW camp to translate. Given the times, however, he used his smattering of French to much greater effect, in his romantic endeavors. He had a classy girlfriend in no time, a woman named Claire who managed lorry logistics and spent her spare time driving the little green Austin her father gave her fast enough to scare even Wink. Meanwhile, his frequent classical bouts with his violin might have made him unpopular had he not practiced out in the field, where his faint melodies seemed, softened by distance, like a shell-punctuated dream.

And he completely embraced Hadntz’s vision. Sam thought that, for Wink, it was an intellectual lark, a puzzle, a technological challenge, a fairy tale of science. Fun.

For Sam, though, it was deadly serious. He was now deeply sensitized to death; couldn’t bear to think about it. He saw death once, and not by design. As a result, he eschewed one popular form of entertainment, which was going up on Artillery Hill to watch the 101st Airborne practice jumps. Men spilled from the open bay like apples from a barrel, to become scattered black dolls in the sky. White chutes puffed open, flowering the sky with what might have been notes against the wavy staff of cloud strata, but two of the jumpers were made into quarter notes by the straight line sketched when they plummeted straight to the ground.

The meat wagon revved its siren, beyond the complex of barracks and Quonset huts and the dance hall. He heard that in combat they dropped the parachutists from only three hundred feet.

Belcher’s complaints about being kept out of paratroop duty subsided.

T
OGETHER, SAM AND WINK
pulled several all-nighters working on the device, but work was temporarily held up while Wink went through various official and unofficial channels in search of necessary chemicals.

When a crate of musical instruments arrived one day, they were immediately requisitioned by Sam, Wink, Earl T., and The Mess.

Earl T. was a cadaverous young man, tall and pale with a sudden, bewitching grin. His hands spanned an octave or more; his playing was relaxed, natural, fully realized.

The Mess was inclined to bobbing his head and making peculiar
ch-ch
sounds, which, after he got his set of drums, Sam realized was his own internal drumbeat, in which he dwelt. He also had a knockout crooning voice, which Sam wished was more punchy, more along the lines of “Salt Peanuts.”

With this promising group as its core, the Perham Downs, a swing band, was organized. The villages around Tidworth contained a number of small dance venues—church recreation rooms, town halls, and the like. The name Perham Downs had the strong ring of destiny; after all, the Perham Downs had been a military training ground for centuries. But the destiny they hoped for was a bit of extra cash and the strong possibility of attracting women.