In War Times (3 page)

But she had the stuff of human mind in her briefcase. Not actual, physical brain matter, but data. The roots of all bodily processes, including, therefore, the mechanics of consciousness.

This information had to be placed in the hands of those who wished to defeat National Socialism. Those who wanted to retrieve an enlightened, cultured Europe. Those who wished Vienna, London, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Budapest to continue to contribute to the arts and to learning. To freedom of mind. There was so little depth here in America. So little time. Everything was new, less than a few hundred years old.

The labor of millennia was being destroyed overseas, and she was wasting her time here. She could convince no one of the importance of her work. Perhaps they would listen in London. Perhaps not. She had an appointment with British Intelligence, but she couldn’t stay there long, either.

Mr. Dance was the most intelligent of the students she had lectured in the past three months and a lovely, awkward young man. She hoped the material she had given him was convincing, for it was as important as the future of the world.

Her device did not fully work, not yet. The new design was better. It was still imperfect, requiring more research, more thought, more experiments and experience. She had had glimmerings of how the device would perform, and with it had seen vast suffering as well as joyous possibilities. If only she could stay—the United States was truly the center of all that she needed to make the device work. But she couldn’t leave her family to fate.

Science had turned its attention, lately, to how life had begun. She felt, sometimes, as if she was using life to create something better than what had ensued—using it to create another level of life, one that would be better for everyone, each according to his own lights, not hers. The optimism felt after the Armistice, when it seemed that war might be ended forever, was long vanished. Complete disorder and its attendant suffering was abundant now. Poland was ruined; Russia was being overrun; London staunchly survived beneath a steady rain of bombs. The human world—its social order, its trade, its ability to function—was in chaos, and much worse threatened. It was a mad descent into the worst of what humans could be and do.

She hoped that Dance might understand her paper, the possibilities contained therein, and pursue them. Use them. To create his own device.

She felt a bit worried about seducing him. He seemed to take it all much too seriously. She hoped that someday he would understand why she had done it, apart from the fact that he was utterly attractive.

She finished packing; made sure that she had the papers she needed to get her where she was going.

Then she opened the briefcase and unlocked the steel box inside. Opening it, she took a deep breath, then lifted out her present product.

This time it was resinous, compact, filled with computing power which most of her colleagues simply would not believe possible. Far beyond the top-secret Norden Bombsight, beyond even the new computers nourished by the tycoon Loomis at Tuxedo Park and his friends at MIT, it was informed by a biological computer that communicated with what was called, in certain physics circles, the non-local universe.

In short, if human consciousness was the time-sensitive entity she believed it was, this device could be called a time machine—although that would be a clumsy, inexact way of describing it. It would meld the latest discoveries in physics with the latest discoveries about biology—a connection that very few scientists, with the exclusion of James Watson, ventured to consider.

It was a machine, but it was a machine that affected the physics of consciousness and of human behavior. It could, if distributed throughout the world, possibly affect the course of history. She had invented a device that enhanced a human sense—the sense of time, consciousness itself. It would enable humans to use the constant expansion of the universe, in much the same way that the previously invisible power of electricity had been harnessed and was now put to all kinds of positive uses, just as the microscope revealed worlds which before could only be surmised inaccurately, and as x-rays were used by Curie to see into matter deeply and precisely.

She knew, though, that her present device was incomplete, dangerous, a bit like direct current. She still was searching for refinement, for control.

Searching time, searching thought, searching possibilities in which others might call the future. To her they were all just possible avenues of time, which were always occurring without being sensed.

She activated it with a simple switch and felt it whirr gently in her hands. Her fingers rested in hollows she had fashioned for them of a new, permeable, conducting material, which completed the circuit. It would no longer require the starting boost the switch had given it.

Using her thumbs to turn the dials on the device’s face, she watched her adjustments register as two dots of light that merged into one on the tiny screen. Then she moved her right thumb and took one dot of light into a quadrant that was geometrically described on the bottom of the screen.

She called what then happened to her “splintering.” Perhaps it was simply her imagination, but time stretched around her, dividing and dividing again, so fast that any gaps in consciousness seemed smooth.

This had always been happening—not just to her, but to everyone, though it had been impossible to witness. There were a truly infinite amount of times, spilling like stars into the vacuum, never-ending, always expanding. But like microbes and faraway galaxies, before humans had invented the tools to see them, the inner workings of time were not available to humans.

But splintering was the wrong word, she suddenly realized. It was more like a bloom of matter on some surface, expanding until it linked with other blooms. What was it like? Being a part of it rather than an observer, she could not know. Perhaps it was as if she became infused in some medium, the medium in which time existed, like a drop of food coloring expanding in treelike tendrils through water, finally losing definition with agitation. Or maybe it was a sudden, softer expansion, but always there was this sense of infusion, and linking, and blending, this awakening of vision and the vast possibilities to which her present time, in all its boundless descriptives, was a doorway. It just depended on which way she turned once she had gone through it.

What would happen if all these blooms, all these possibilities united suddenly? If she crossed some edge? If the blooms infused one another? Who or what might she become? How many times could she do this without risking her connection with the present, with her daughter?

Was she simply imagining these other presents, the one in which Hitler died at birth, or another in which the Germans were not sent into poverty to pay for the Great War, another in which her mother set a vase of five roses instead of seven on the lace tablecloth one afternoon in July 1919? All blooms, all splinters, all soft and sharp at the same time, each of them a decision that could not be changed without knowing the possibilities, the outcome, of a single action. The only constant seemed to be her own consciousness, her own point of view.

The phone rang again, penetrating the brilliance, the intensity, of the splintering, where it seemed as if she were living many lives at once. Spent, shuddering, she managed to put down the device and to flick the switch that turned it off. Sweat ran down her forehead.

This
world was her present world—the world where Poland had been brutally subjugated, and then, Holland, Norway, Denmark.

To find the possibility of change, she had to go through the steps. Find a catalyst, a place where the very bonds of atoms were broken, loosing particles which until now had been held in place by—by what? Gravity? Time? Were they one and the same? After getting her daughter out of Budapest, she planned to go to Berlin, where surely the Nazis were at work on the atomic bomb. Given their head start, which thus far had given them a great military advantage, they had to have been working on it for several years, and they had to be farther along than the Americans. But if she needed to, she would return to the United States, by any means possible.

She locked up the device and wiped her forehead with a towel she grabbed from the bathroom rack. She looked in the mirror over the sink.

Now,
there
was a wild woman. She smiled, imagining the dear voice of her mother telling her that she was too thin, that she should not have those hollows beneath her cheekbones, that she should take time from her studies to eat! Her hair, mostly black, but beginning to be streaked with white, fell in spiraling curls down both sides of her face, the lines of which deepened every day. She flattened her hair back and held it with combs, twisted it into a bun, powdered her face, applied bright red lipstick, and looked into brown eyes that seemed to be envisioning vast distances. She did not look like…herself. She closed her eyes, pressed her fingers against her eyelids, and looked again.

Better.

Donning her scarf and coat, she picked up her bag, her hatbox, and her valise, took the elevator downstairs, and walked through the plush lobby straight into a cab that was waiting for someone else. “Union Station, please,” she said.

Sam Dance was a thoughtful person. His mother was deeply religious, from Quaker roots, but he was not remotely so. Still, she had imbued in him a richer sense of the dimensions of humans than most men his age had.

In his robe, he seated himself at his desk and tuned his radio to WLW, which carried clear-channel dance music from Cincinnati. He slowly turned the pages Hadntz had left, trying to absorb it all. Trying to make sense of what had just happened.

Trying to understand this gift.

For a gift it was; apparently the life’s work of the strangest woman he had ever met. The strangest person of either sex. His mind was pulled along the straight rails of her reasoning as a wrench to a giant cyclotron. He did not know how she had learned what she knew about the genetic basis of life, the quantum nature of the mind. He went over where she had probably been, whom she must have studied with. Freud, she had said. A medical education. Work with x-rays. This much was clear in her computations of the probable structure of something she was calling a parallel spiral. A history of the advances in biochemistry during the first three decades of the twentieth century was included. These ideas amazed him; they had not been taught in school. He learned that some people believed that a molecule called DNA contained the mechanism for passing on hereditary information. Many of the papers in the file had been published. The more recent ones remained unpublished.

He paged through the mechanical drawings and saw a strange object that excited him.

The drawing was not titled—in fact, the edges were ragged, as if all identifying matter had been torn off.

The central part of the object was round, with eight circles projecting from its core. Two vacuum tubes were inserted into the holes on opposite sides—no, three, he saw, studying the side view, where the circle was a rectangle and its innards contained a cathode tube, described by neat lettering. There was no scale in the picture, but judging from the other tubes, this cathode was unimaginably small.

Some kind of generator—one not yet made, as far as he knew. An incredibly small electronic miracle. He turned the pages slowly as the night wore on, reading neurology, biology, physics. He read about how in 1928 Frederick Griffith did an experiment with pneumonia bacteria and mice that proved that the molecule of inheritance was DNA, not the protein surrounding it, as others had thought. But what exactly
was
DNA? What did it look like, how did it actually work? An unpublished paper by Dr. Eliani Hadntz asserted that, based on x-ray crystallography photographs she had made of the DNA molecule, it had to have a structure like a curving ladder, which separated and integrated itself into other such structures in order to pass on its information. She had apparently just completed this paper when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.

Gradually, he realized that she was trying to figure out what organic life was, and how it differed from inorganic matter. She was a medical doctor and also a physicist; she was trying to unite the two disciplines and devise a technology that would harness the power of human memory, human thought, of whatever consciousness was, on a very fine physical level, in the realm of quantum mechanics.

His room grew cold, and he neglected to bang on the radiator.

He forgot to eat until it was far too late to do so.

He fell asleep at the desk, and woke at five thirty in the morning.

He went to the window where she had stood, raised the window to a shock of cold, and leaned into darkness.

Everything—his understanding of the nature of life and of time—had changed for him. Overnight.

Several hundred miles north of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, six Japanese aircraft carriers rolled on mountainous swells, awaiting orders.

S
AM WOKE AROUND
noon on Sunday after little sleep. Weak sunlight glowed at the edges of the drawn shade. His desk was empty once again save for his Crosley. The papers he had pored over until dawn, now hidden under the mattress, had given him strange dreams that he could not now recall, though their luminous essence lingered. The four walls of his dull green room seemed alien now, like the room of a stranger.

He got out of bed and gave the ring at the bottom of the shade a sharp tug. Outside, afternoon shadows were already creeping across the street, and a lone black car passed below. One man wearing an open overcoat with his scarf hanging untied strode west, and tossed a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. The dark limbs of bare trees stood out against the row of town houses, many of which, like this one, were now rented by the military. On 14th Street, a block away, a trolley car passed, and three young, well-dressed women strolled uptown.

After shaving and dressing, Sam walked over to 14th. Turning left, he passed the Piggly Wiggly and Steelman’s Liquor, both closed on Sunday. Scholl’s Cafeteria would be packed with late-service churchgoers. Peoples Drug had a phalanx of smiling, white-uniformed women behind the counter, all expecting large tips. He passed both places and continued another block to Frank’s, a drugstore with a newsstand and a soda fountain. Frank had the best prices he’d found in this neighborhood.