In War Times (36 page)

“Your contact?”

“He’s in the Kremlin. Risking his life, like all of us. And my aunt, she’s—”

“What?”

“She’s dead. Shot.” Bette’s voice was flat. “Purged along with thousands of others.”

She threw her float out the car window. It arced across the parking lot and smashed, foamy white, on the black pavement. The man in the next car looked at Sam with pity.

Bette covered her face with both hands and he held her close as she shook. “It’s horrible. It’s so horrible. Worse than the war. And I just…can’t…stand it any more.”

“You don’t have to.”

She flung herself against the door. Her pale face was red and blotched. Grabbing a napkin, she mopped at her face and blew her nose and laughed. “No, Dance, that’s where you’re wrong. I always have to. Always. There is no escape from this knowledge.”

“Knowledge…of what?” he asked gently.

“Of the never-endingness of war.
We are still at war, Dance
.” Her tone of voice was fierce, angry. “And I want it to stop.”

Sam took her hand. “At some point you just need to give it a rest. They were after it, you know. The OSS. They visited me several times.”

“It?” Her tear-washed eyes were very blue.

“Hadntz’s…device.”

She stared at him. “Have you seen her again?” Her voice was level and restored, almost as if she had not been crying a moment before.

“Who do you have to tell if I tell you?”

She looked out at the roller-skating waitress. “You’re right. Say nothing, then.”

“So you’re not out.”

“No. I can never be out. I told you.”

“I didn’t know exactly what you meant.”

“I’m telling you now. I am to be what is called a sleeper. They could wake me up at any time. I feel…the importance of it. Maybe I could cry and tell them that I’m a woman, I don’t want all this, but it’s the responsibility of…my soul.” She looked at him gravely for a moment, then grinned wryly. “Want to annul this deal, Dance?” Her eyes were wide and full of absolute permission, but her expression reminded him of Keenan’s before he dove off the high rock at Puzzle Creek Falls into swirling waters terrifyingly far below, something neither Sam nor any of their other buddies would ever attempt. For Keenan, it was part of his bargain with life: give and take no quarter. Test it, do it all, to the limit, head-on, with naked honesty, knowing all the risks. No matter how dangerous. For no one’s satisfaction but your own, because otherwise you were not alive.

“Not on your life, Mrs. Dance.”

So when he went up into the attic at home, he went alone, while his dad took Bette out to the orchard to show her the early-ripening Transparent apples. Unscrewing the back of the radio, he reached inside.

It wasn’t there.

Deeply chilled, he went downstairs to look for a flashlight. “Going to visit Sarah later?” his mother asked. His sister had been asking him to see her new house.

“I think so, Ma. She wants to have us over for dinner. I want to meet my nephews.”

He forced himself back up the stairs, thinking that perhaps the world had changed, that the device had never been there in the first place, even hoping for that: a burden lifted. Responsibility vanished. So easy.

This attic room had been the property of himself and Keenan. They had put down the floor, hammered up lath, and plastered the walls. The girls had taken over the sleeping porch for their territory. Neither area had been heated, so it took a certain amount of fortitude for the kids to avail themselves of privacy in the crowded house during the winter months.

Often when Sam had come up here, he had found Keenan reading in an old overstuffed chair in the corner. His taste as a boy ran to adventure books about the frozen north written by James Oliver Curwood, tales of isolation, courage, and moral triumph.

Sam unscrewed the back of the radio and removed the board that covered the insides. Shining the light into the radio, he was almost disappointed to see the lead box. He reached inside, pulled out the box, and opened it.

The device had changed.

It might be a radio, except that it was impossibly small, with no room for tubes. It was round, about the size of the cavity magnetron, but was a lightweight device of white plastic with one dial that was an on/off switch. Another controlled—volume? And another, frequency? What could this mean? This hadn’t been built. This…
thing
…had rearranged itself in the past few years.

He leaned against the wall and shook with quiet laughter.

Maybe he should dial up Wink? Perhaps he could make him loud or quiet—how convenient. Or maybe he could move the antenna a bit; get a slightly different Wink. Change the frequency, and he might be in Wink’s world and Bette gone. Dial in possible realities, and then fine-tune them. The possibilities got more hilarious by the second.

No, really. The physical appearance and characteristics had changed radically. It felt soft and warm, unshatterable. He ran his finger around one edge and a spectrum of soft lights appeared.

Fascinating.

If there was an antenna, it was inside, and there was no apparent source of power.

It was endlessly seductive. Combinations of colors beckoned, different sequences of access. But to what, he did not know. A square inch of something like a radar screen appeared, giving him several visible vectors of information. But of what?

It was a marvelous, intriguing puzzle. Funny to think that it had sprung from those equations he’d looked at back in his Washington room a lifetime ago.

“What’s that?”

He turned to see his mother leaning over him.

“Oh. I didn’t hear you coming up.”

She reached over his shoulder and lifted it from his hand before he had a chance to object. “Some kind of machine…” The thing emitted a soft glow in the dim light.

She gasped, and dropped the thing. He followed her glance.

“It’s…it’s Keenan. Sam. It’s Keenan.” She was breathing hard, and put one hand to her chest.

Keenan indeed sat in his chair in the corner.

Sam did not move. Quietly he asked, over the pounding of his heart so loud that surely his mother and Keenan and the men in black suits and even Stalin, ten thousand miles away, must hear. “What is he doing?”

She forced out a whisper. “Reading.”

“What?”

“
Popular
.” She cleared her throat and her voice became a bit stronger. “That’s all I can see. A magazine.”

Sam indeed recognized a recent issue of
Popular Mechanics
.

“How old is he?”

“Grown. Like he would be today if…he were alive.”

“What is he wearing?”

“Green plaid shirt. He has a beard. He never grew a beard.”

Keenan looked up from his reading and broke into a wide grin. “Oh, hi. I didn’t see you.”

His mother whispered
No
, and ran down the stairs. Keenan got up from his chair and walked toward Sam.

He vanished as he walked.

Sam grabbed the device and spent an hour patiently moving the two dials, methodically trying different combinations and sequences and writing them down so as not to repeat himself. He finally realized that he needed the computing power of the SCR-584 or better, and high speed, to run through all the possibilities. And then, if there was nothing to focus on, it would find nothing, infinitely.

Hadntz had proposed, in her paper, the creation of a quantum computer. Was this it? Perhaps it
was
working, even now. The heart’s desire of both himself and his mother had appeared. Another world glimpsed?

Hearing footsteps, he turned. It was Bette.

“Sam, it’s time for—” Then her eyes dropped to the device. “Mom seems kind of upset. She went for a walk. I’ve been getting dinner ready.” She knelt beside him. “Something happened.”

He sighed deeply. “Yes. We both saw Keenan.”

Bette stared at him. “It…works.”

He shrugged. “Something happened. Now it’s stopped happening.” He looked her full in the face, searching her eyes. “What do you have to do about this?”

“Nothing,” she said decisively, putting her hand on his shoulder. “I didn’t see anything.”

“Treason. You’ll be shot.”

She stood and walked over to the window, her hands in the pockets of the ruffled apron she wore over plain slacks and a white shirt. She looked out the window for a long time. “What’s all that stuff shining on the barn across the road?”

“Bottles. Johanstien strings them up by their necks and they clank together in the wind. Makes an unholy racket. He’s been doing that as long as I remember. Dad says, Of all the places in the world why do I have to live across the road from a goddamn bottle farm?”

Bette laughed quietly. Then she turned, her face serious. “I meant it, Sam. I’ve had enough of war. I’m not even curious any more. Maybe something’s wrong with me. I can’t believe there will ever be a cure. It’s like a dog chasing its tail. And the cure might be worse than the disease.” She started downstairs. “Dinner’s in ten minutes.”

After a moment, Sam put the thing back in the radio and replaced the cover. He was sitting crosslegged on the floor when his mother came back up and sat on the top step. With the attic door open he could hear that the table was being set, and that his dad was listening to the evening news.

“Sam? What happened? What’s going on?”

“I had to know. If we were seeing the same thing. Have you ever…wondered exactly what’s going on?”

“As in, why are they charging so much for electricity?”

“Cosmically. Philosophically. Scientifically.”

“Oh, sure. I ransack the library. I read philosophy. I read the Bible. What do you think religion’s all about? Sometimes at night I might get into a funk looking at a dining room chair or a pot on the stove and wondering what it is, really, and why I am here. I guess you come by it honestly. But after Keenan—I just kind of stopped. For a while I didn’t care what was going on. My curiosity failed completely. Just went away.” She looked over in the corner. “Did you really see him?”

“I did.”

“The mind can do funny things. After your grandmother died, I thought that I saw her once. It was downtown, on Fifth Street. I’d just come out of the baker’s and she was on the next block, walking toward me, just like she had so many times when we went shopping together. It was a sunny day. Cool, in the springtime. Hedringer had daffodils growing in the barrel out front of his hardware store. For a moment it was like she had never died. It was the most uncanny feeling. She looked at me while she was crossing the street and my heart just raced. And then as she got closer, I saw that she was a complete stranger. She saw me staring at her and smiled at me as she passed.

She went on in a low, steady voice. “Sam, Keenan is dead. I went for a walk to try and think, to…to
recover
.” She took a deep breath.

“That was not Keenan we saw. It wasn’t anyone. I don’t like not caring a fig. I don’t like just going through the motions. Neither do I like crying morning, noon, and night. But I simply cannot believe that Keenan is somewhere, alive. It’s not in me. I don’t have the energy for that anymore. I don’t want to pin any hopes on a hallucination. Even if we both had it.”

“You sound a lot like Bette.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“It had something to do with that radio thing you had.”

“Yes, it did. I’m pretty sure about that. But I couldn’t…find him again. I’ve been trying ever since.”

“I’m not saying that anything is impossible. I guess, given enough time, anything might be possible. You’re dad’s all worried now that the Russians might have the atomic bomb and that pretty soon they’ll drop it on Middleburg and we’ll all die like the poor Japanese in Hiroshima.”

“I’m sure that they’re working on it.”

“I’ve lost one son to war, Sam. That’s my limit. Whatever you’re doing, please be careful.”

Sam went down to Puzzle Creek alone the next morning.

He walked down a country road for a half-mile. The June corn was practically singing on both sides of the road and the sky was a clear blue bowl overhead. Heat was rising from the road already. One car approached him and he recognized April Mysen, a distant cousin, and waved as she passed.

When he got to the bridge he scrambled down the steep embankment and passed beneath it. A narrow trail accompanied the creek downstream on its way past old sycamores and gravel screes where it was at one time easy to find Indian arrowheads. Sam recalled days of smashing the thin ice over air pockets with a stick, or of swinging out on a rope over the deep swimming hole around the bend, letting go, and sailing down into the cool green depths.

After another half-mile the Puzzle deserved the appellation of small river as it gathered itself for the plunge into a larger waterway. He could hear the dull roar of the rapids now as the gorge narrowed. Sam rounded a bend, sweating, and sat on a boulder just at the point where he could see the whole railroad bridge.

The trestle was fifty feet high and a hundred feet long. It looked as if it was built for the express purpose of daring boys to walk across.

In fact, he saw movement in the woods and then three boys arrived at the end of the trestle. Obviously arguing.

He stood up and hiked up the hill toward them; his noise caught their attention and they watched his approach sullenly. One of them started an overhand volley of rocks, trying to hit the trestle.

“Morning.”

“Hi,” said one of them. Straw-colored hair stuck out below a Reds cap.

“Sam Dance.”

They looked at each other. “Oh yeah,” said Reds cap. “You live down Route 3, right?”

“My parents do.”

“You’re a vet.”

“Right.”

“My dad knows you,” said the tallest. “Rob McElroy. He’s a vet too.”

“So you’re Rob’s boy.”

“Bobby.”

“Did he ever tell you about the day my brother got caught on the bridge with a train coming?”

They looked at him with new respect, then quickly looked away, trying to seem bored.

“Were you here too?” Rob’s boy looked a lot like him at that age, thin and gangly as a colt, with a diffident slouch and a quiet, determined face.