In War Times (16 page)

The major stopped pacing, raised one eyebrow as he looked at them, and said, “Well, men, perhaps that is the reason you are going on this little trip.”

“How little?” asked Wink.

“Frankly, I have no idea. You are just to get in that automobile waiting out there for you and do as you’re told.”

“That Rolls-Royce?” asked Sam. “I’m not dressed for the occasion. Have you spoken to our CO?”

“I might,” said the Major, “if you make it necessary. As I have mentioned, there really are things I ought to tell him.”

“Well, throw me in the briar patch,” said Wink. “I’ll bet that Rolls has a bar.”

Sam tried to memorize the distances and the turns, as usual. The driver, dressed in a suit, chatted affably about the weather, the raids, and the bloody awful Germans and how Stalin was going to crush them once and for all. However, when asked questions, he said, “I am just the driver, sir.”

After an hour, during which Wink and Sam were silent—Wink searched the refrigerator and found it contained only an empty gin bottle—the driver turned right onto the winding driveway of a large, red manor house.

“Rather astounding place,” remarked Wink.

“Amazingly…ugly.”

It had sprouted many wings which were stylistically unconnected to one another, and had a vaguely German air because of the half-timbers. Bicycles littered the front steps, and at least one was propped next to each of the multitudinous doors.

“This is it?”

“Not quite yet, sir.”

Behind the manor were long, low buildings, obviously war-built. The driver parked the Rolls. They followed him to a back door. The guard said, “G’day, sir,” and nodded them in. The driver then led them up two flights of stairs and down a wide hallway. Opening the door, he motioned them in, hung his hat and jacket on the coat stand, and took a seat behind the desk.

“Just the driver?” asked Wink.

“Don’t worry. You didn’t give anything away. Can’t blame me for trying.” He offered them cigarettes, which each accepted. Leaning back in his chair, he propped up his feet on the desk, lit his own, put out his match with a flourish, and tossed it in the ashtray he’d settled on his lap.

“So who are you?” asked Sam.

“You don’t need to know.”

“Your child’s bedroom?” asked Wink, glancing around.

“Someone else’s child, I’m afraid, although I find the Peter Rabbit wallpaper comforting.” He tilted his head as smoke drifted upward. “You know, of course, that we have radar. It’s a war secret, but you are in a position to know about it, so I presume I’m giving nothing away in telling you that.”

“Correct.” Sam smoked his cigarette in a leisurely fashion, leaned forward to flick the ashes into the ashtray on the desk.

“It helped us survive the Blitz. The Germans knew we had something, of course, but couldn’t figure out its exact nature. However, something happened to the radar the night of last Saturday. All of our stations picked up an object at the same time, and that object was triangulated as being in your shop. Your very shop, gentlemen. It was a radio object, some sort of transmission that canceled our beam. What was it?”

Wink, uncharacteristically, said nothing.

The man took his feet off the desk and resumed an upright position with an accompanying screech and thump of his chair. He took out some papers from the top drawer, tapped them to straighten them, and handed them to Sam. “Might it have been something like this?”

Wink leaned over Sam’s shoulder.

The contents of the paper resembled Dr. Hadntz’s plans to a startling degree. There were differences, though, and omissions. Sam paged through the papers, studying each one, trying to decide what to do, what to say. He was pretty much on his own here—at least, he hoped he was. Wink was a bit of a wild card, but so far that had always been for the best.

He returned the papers to the desk. “Where did you get this?”

“Answer my question.”

“Might I have some tea?”

No Englishman could refuse such a request, and while it was fetched, Sam considered.

Something about the device, quite startlingly, had worked. But what?

This was not an American officer they were speaking to. He had no jurisdiction over them.

He returned with the cups of steaming tea, set them on the desk, and resumed his seat. “We know about Dr. Hadntz,” said the man, whose identity, in Sam’s eyes, had morphed from the driver into The Driver. “We know that she took a device like this out of the United States. And,” said The Driver, looking at Sam, “we know that she took a particular liking to you. Now we detect this…effect. Exactly where you were. In addition, she vanished into Hungary several months ago.”

But Sam had seen her in London.

Or some version of London. He suddenly had a vision of tableaus, like cards, shuffled by a careless hand. Each card, each tableau, was somehow contiguous with the others, but held its own universe, which fled outward from the flat plane of the card into many-dimensional realities, each with its own history, its own emotional justifications.

The Brit continued. “If her…invention…falls into the hands of the Germans, they can obviously wreak havoc on our radar. And probably deduce how it works, as well. We will lose one of our few advantages. This could easily—very easily—turn the tide of the war against us.”

Sam’s relaxation was total. He didn’t know what Hadntz’s invention did—but neither did they. He had a very strong feeling, though, that it was something much more radical than interfering with radar.

He didn’t know whether the British knew this or not. He guessed not. There had been nothing, in the plans he had just looked over, of theory. Nothing about the twin helix. They were only a set of mechanical drawings that included a close facsimile of the top-secret cavity magnetron.

“Did you build one yourself?” asked Sam.

“Answer the question, please.”

“What did it do?”

The Driver sighed. “Very well. We did make this device. It did nothing of note other than blow some fuses. It did not block our radar.”

It did not contain the modifications Hadntz had given Sam in the house in London.

The telephone rang. “Excuse me.” A pause. “Who wants to know? Oh. Major Elegante. I see.” He replaced the phone in its cradle. “Come, then. It seems that you’re wanted at home. An utterly integral cog in the assembly of jeeps for Overlord. You see,” he said gently, “we wanted to ask you to work with us. I’m sure we could have made some arrangements. The United States is supposed to be sharing scientific information with us unilaterally. But apparently that has its limits, according to a certain Major Elegante. I’ll see that you’re driven back—you’ll excuse me, but there is something else I need to do now. Good to meet you both. Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

They didn’t speak until after the drive back, the route of which Sam once again memorized, although there were no signs. They made their way to the flight line, where no one could hear them.

“A shame he didn’t offer us lunch,” said Wink.

“He got us off quickly so as not to share their beef Wellington and fresh vegetables and trifles.”

“Not to mention full-strength coffee. I’ll bet they drink a lot of it at that place.” Nearby, teams of maintenance workers swarmed over several battered Spitfires that had limped home after an engagement with a phalanx of German bombers the night before. Engines roared to life and then stopped. Propellers, windshields, and tails were replaced as they watched. “How did that guy ever get back?” Wink wondered, pointing at a plane that had a two-foot-wide hole in the side.

“Do you want to go on with this?” Sam asked.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m suspicious of the whole thing now.”

“You weren’t before?”

“Apparently they’ve kept an eye on us.”

“Of course they have. We’re working on something the Brits don’t have. I’m not at all sure that our own CO doesn’t know we’re up to something and has orders to protect it. War secrets, and all. There are agents all over the place, I’ll bet. Didn’t you say they questioned you about Hadntz in D.C. right after she gave you the plans? Who is this Major Elegante, anyway?”

“Elegante was there.”

“Did you tell me this before?”

“No.”

Wink whistled. “Damn. We’re valuable, Dance. Look, last week we figured out how to make those Bell Lab computers work. Rescued the whole M-9 program. They didn’t have a clue. It would have set things back for months—who knows if another shipment would have even made it over here. The ship could have been sunk. They ought to give us some bloody medals.”

“That’s
damned
medals to you, Yank, and don’t you forget it.”

The Bell Lab computers, which calculated where a moving target would be, were actually sine- and cosine-shaped fiberboard wrapped in wire. None of the M-9’s they were testing from the huge shipment had worked. After a lot of elimination, Sam had finally figured out that it had to be the boards. After more elimination, he realized that the boards had been slightly warped in shipment. So slightly warped, in fact, that it was not perceptible by ordinary perusal. He’d deduced it after studying the entire setup, and he and Wink quickly made the lot of the M-9’s functional. Then they submitted a report with suggestions about how to prevent this problem in the future.

Sam said, “I think that whatever Hadntz incorporated into her most recent plans—”

“Which she gave you in London, under the noses of the Brits—”

“Well,” Sam smiled, “it
seemed
to be London. Anyway, it was a vital change.”

“Right. Actually, it was a lot of little things.”

“Fine-tuning, like figuring out that the slightly warped fiberboard was causing the whole beautiful SCR-584 not to function at all.”

“And that’s how she made the whole London thing happen.”

“I wonder if she knew that’s what would happen. She said something about it having been difficult to find me. I don’t think it would be too hard to find me here.”

“Depends on where she started from.”

“The Brits can’t find her.”

“No doubt if we went looking, we couldn’t either.”

Sam sat on a rock and lit a cigarette. Wink leaned against it and lit his own. They smoked in silence for a moment.

Then Sam said, “Let’s call it off.”

Wink looked at Sam, a startled expression on his face. “What?”

“I mean, we have no idea what we’re doing, who we’re working for, really. Even if Hadntz really has the best intentions in mind, I’m not sure that she really knows where this is going. Maybe we’re part of a big chain of labs manufacturing this thing everywhere, and when they’re ready, they’ll all link up and—”

“I kind of thought that was where this was all leading to,” said Wink. “Some kind of huge, overwhelming change. Like—yes, nuclear fission is possible. But what if they make a bomb that creates an explosion that never stops, that changes everything into one huge chain reaction?” He tossed his cigarette away. “Damn, where’s the whisky when you need it? Look, Dance, we trust each other, right?”

Sam smiled. “Can’t play jazz without trust.”

“
Especially
not modern jazz. I know why you’re doing this. Because of your brother.”

“Because people are being killed. Not just him. He keeps me going, though. Why are you doing it?”

Wink perched on the rock and stared across the field of damaged aircraft. “This war is like a huge dark cloud of hate. I’m not sure that we really know what’s going on over there, across the channel. But I know that all the scientists and artists fled before it. They’re bellwethers, I would think. Maybe more sensitive than most people. Needing more refined conditions in which to work.”

“All the European lecturers and professors had a story about why they left Europe,” said Sam.

“My father kept all kinds of scientific journals and papers in his office. I guess his dream was to be some kind of professor, and instead he wound up with a factory. But it’s no secret that the Germans know about the possibility of nuclear fission. It’s no secret to anyone in the world who was up on those kinds of things—mathematics, physics. Who knows what kind of secret weapon the Germans are working on right now? Like the guy said, any little thing could turn the tide of this war. Maybe this is it.”

“But if this works, will it stop the war? Or will it ruin everything?”

“Hadntz apparently believes that it will stop the war,” said Wink.

“And I have another question. Do our guys know we’re working on this, or just the Brits?”

“Obviously, Elegante does. Beyond that, who knows? She may be some kind of wild card herself. Or maybe they’re just giving us enough rope to hang ourselves.”

After the war, Sam figured out they’d been taken to Bletchley Park.

A few days later, The Mess knocked on the door of what they euphemistically referred to as their “office.”

“Yo,” said Wink, cracking open the door, the better to disguise his stash of whisky, which he was not inclined to share.

“We got company.”

Sam joined Wink and looked out the door.

About ten British soldiers were methodically searching the garage. They’d clearly started at the front and were working their way back. Sam thought that maybe they had about fifteen minutes.

“Get Kocab,” he said to The Mess.

He watched The Mess stroll across the garage, picking up a wrench on the way, and incline his head toward Kocab’s. Kocab picked up the large rag he used to wipe his hands and casually walked toward their office.

As the soldiers worked their way closer, opening and slamming locker doors and rummaging through toolboxes, Sam said to Kocab, “It’s heavy,” and slipped him the device. Kocab accepted it, and then Sam saw it no more. Kocab walked back toward the jeep he was assembling, stopping to chat with The Mess on the way.

A moment later one of the searchers opened their door and squeezed into the cubicle. “Where did you get that?” he demanded.

“What?” asked Wink.

“All this bloody whisky, that’s what.”

Wink had to sacrifice half of their stash to the guy.

“Nice decoy,” said Sam after he was gone.

“Shut up.”

When Kocab brought it back the next day, he said, “What is this stuff?”