In War Times (45 page)

Megan joined the Brownies, Brian was a Boy Scout, and Jill quit the Girl Scouts when she discovered that the troop’s focus seemed to be on feminization rather than learning how to tie knots, build a bivouac, and survive in the wilderness.

To the distress of his children, he continued to play the saxophone, practicing his scales frequently and working on new compositions. He kept the radio tuned to a station that played music of the forties. One day he overheard Jill saying to Brian, “That music’s
fifteen years old
! When is he going to get
over
it?”

He began to amass a fine, current record collection: Monk, Trane, Miles Davis. Their new cool jazz seemed in accord with the cold war after the heat and speed of war and postwar bop, and was the background to their game-playing evenings and to the long nights afterward when he often sat up reading or playing solitaire, which gave his hands something to do while he was thinking. Gardening was also useful in that way.

He made a few trips to New York, but The Street—the 52nd street jazz clubs—was gone—now mostly strip joints and adult bookstores. There was jazz to be found, and the shaggy men he’d seen in Minton’s years ago on his Easter trip to meet Wink had evolved into a distinct breed, beatniks, who sat around in the clubs getting gone. He heard a lot of the jazz lingo he’d grown up with—
cats, man, bread, square, dig, daddy-o
—spoken there. Hardcore jazz was still there, of course—cooled down, smoothed out. But the decline in The Street was depressing.

Bette’s interest in flying did not wane. She often took the kids to a small airfield at Bailey’s Crossroads in rural Virginia to admire the small planes, and watch them take off and land. On her birthday Sam rented a plane for her and she took them all on a flight over Washington, up the Potomac, over the Blue Ridge, and back over the Piedmont. The kids were thrilled. They ate weekly at a small, downstairs restaurant in the District’s Chinatown, where the proprietors chatted with them about Honolulu.

Bette began taking afternoon and evening classes in developmental biochemistry at Georgetown University. Every six months or so, she let her assistant teach the kids in her school while she was gone, somewhere, for a week. She told the kids she was giving teaching seminars.

Sam did not ask where she really went.

It was August. Sam was on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, driving home from a colloquium stirred by the lecture on a new, and, once again, secret technological avenue: a quantum computer. He thought it would probably be years before the world heard anything about its mere existence. Development would pose challenges that looked almost insurmountable. Of course, research and development were occurring in the context of weaponry.

In Wink’s world, they had reached this stage a lot sooner. But one of the main concerns with this technology was one that Wink had not mentioned—the possibility that it might lead to an uncontrolled chain reaction that might have the power to change literally everything. All matter.

How did this synch with Hadntz’s ideas, in which she posited a chain reaction of caring, a biological change in human biochemistry that would lead to the cessation of war?

He merged onto the Beltway, jockeying his way automatically through the fast-moving traffic, and his thoughts wandered.

Every individual was the focus of a unique, but also shared, history. Every second, infinite stories combined, separated, trajected, and formed another history. What kind of matter reflected consciousness? What kind of signals did the brain emit; how could they be tracked?

His HD10 was a potential weapon. He recalled the then-top-secret Rad Lab, the Radiation Lab, set up by Alfred Loomis and Vannevar Bush at MIT in 1940 to quickly develop short-wave radar into a potent tool of war. Had he been recruited, so long ago, as an engineer in an unseen Rad Lab of time? And could Hadntz really vaccinate humanity against the disease of war?

The Beltway was hypnotic. Green, fast summer rushed in through the open windows of his car. Leaves had reached their apex.

Time expanded, became wider.

Summer was Bette, her body familiar to him as his own; lying nude on white sheets sweating, even her closed eyelids sheened. Fall was Jill miniskirts and go-go boots, heading to Georgetown and returning from that same trip wearing combat boots and green, flat-pocketed army pants, a surplus pea jacket rounding out her military fashion ensemble. Winter was Brian spinning the car on parking-lot ice as Sam gripped the dash, trying to teach his boy to drive safely on ice. And spring was delicate, dancing Megan, presently a committed ballerina.

And all of it was controlled by Hadntz, her ideas like bullets, ripping into his life. All of them, everything, children, the war, his wife, his work, his thoughts, rushed through the car, couched in wind that smelled of city, of greenness, of an approaching storm.

He saw his exit approach, and pass by, not as if he were passing it intentionally, but more as if he were sitting still and everything moved except himself, in puzzled surrender of all volition.

When he finally got home, he said hi to Megan, who was playing jacks on the front porch, grabbed the mail from the box, and let the screen door slam behind him. Loosening his tie, he set each piece on the foyer table as he looked at it. The electric bill, Bette’s crossword puzzle magazine, a letter from his sister. And then—

A letter to him, in an envelope of crisp office stationery, the address typed, from Allen Winklemeyer.

The monotonous thump of Megan’s jacks ball and the sparkling metallic scattering as she went through foursies and fivesies receded. He took the letter, went into the living room, and sat in his easy chair. When he opened it, a formal announcement, printed on embossed card stock, fell out: W
INKLEMEYER
N
AMED
D
IRECTOR OF
Q
UANTUM
C
OMPUTER
D
EVELOPMENT AT
N
AVY
Y
ARD
.

Sam let the notice drop to his lap. Of one thing he was sure: this letter was not from his own Navy Yard. How had it gotten here? What was the cryptic announcement supposed to do? Was a nexus about to occur? Were their ever-fluctuating presents moving closer together? Would their two differing scales meet, and produce the new music of which Dr. Hadntz had dreamed?

He reached out, feeling the air against his fingers. Within this medium, Wink. Within it, Keenan, Elsinore, Dr. Eliani Hadntz.

But also within it himself, Bette, their life.

In the attic, hidden in a box in a locked trunk, the latest incarnation of the Hadntz Device. Exuding, perhaps, viruses, DNA, radio waves, infinite spacetimes. A repository of the multiverse; a cipher.

“Ever hear of a ‘quantum computer’?” he asked Bette, as she entered the room carrying two glasses of iced tea garnished with mint from under the back porch. The two words evoked a highly advanced, functioning spectrum of molecular engineering applications.

She stopped for a second and lowered her head, as if listening to something far away.

“Yes,” she finally said, when she had sorted through something, Sam knew not what. “Actually, I have.”

But, of course, she could say no more.

Sam continued to keep his diary, but it had long since ceased to be for Keenan.

Maybe his children would be interested in it someday.

This was Sam’s work. It was a constant war against ineptitude, against people—officials—who didn’t care about things that mattered, who got by the easy way, signing off on reports they never read, leaving all the work to those who actually did care, like Sam and those other invisible bureaucrats who took their charge seriously. Sometimes, it was enough.

O
N AN OVERCAST
afternoon in January, Sam and Bette were in the kitchen with Ed Mach, drinking coffee. Ed—thin, tall, with an overshot jaw and reddish hair—wore an immaculately pressed black suit. He’d been a dinner guest at their home when they’d first moved there and were getting acquainted with the people Bette called the “home boys,” but this time he’d knocked on their door uninvited.

“How about another piece of coffee cake?” asked Bette.

“No, thanks. I’m sorry to bother you at home, but—” He wandered around the kitchen, then leaned against the wall next to the phone.

“You skunk!” yelled Jill from the living room.

“Sam, go see what they’re doing and tell them to be quiet,” said Bette.

Sam did not want to leave, but pushed back his chair. Essentially, Ed was Bette’s guest—if you could call him a guest—but he had been sent to spy on Sam as well. Jill’s
Mad
magazine, featuring the cartoon “Spy vs. Spy,” was closer to the mark than she might imagine.

The kids were sprawled on the living room floor around a metal tray embossed with brilliant colors—some sort of game board, though Sam had no idea what the game might be. It looked as if it might support all kinds of different games, so intricate and varied was the surface. It seemed to move, to shift, beneath his eyes. He blinked. Jill, eyes closed, sat cross-legged, shaking dice in her cupped hands.

“Cranabule!” shouted Brian at the moment she released the dice, and giggled as she looked at the results in horror.

“Stop it!” She grabbed Brian’s shoulders.

“Look!” said Megan, and put her hand over her mouth. The three of them leaned over the game board, blocking Sam’s view of it.

“Why don’t you kids take that upstairs,” Sam told them. “Your mother and I are trying to talk to someone.”

They all looked up at him in the same instant, their faces filled with wonder, as if he’d grown another head.

“You do have your own rooms.”

“Right!” said Jill, after a second’s silence. “C’mon, let’s go up in the attic.” In an instant the paraphernalia was tossed into an old burlap bag, and they were pounding up the stairs.

“Look, I’m just saying that we need to know where it is,” Ed was saying as Sam resumed his seat.

“And I’m saying we just don’t know.” Bette lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair.

“There’s no use in lying. We have tracking data that shows it is here, in this house, and active.”

Bette snorted. “Ed, I know what you’re talking about. That misconceived junk you’re calling a tracker couldn’t find an elephant in a medium-sized ballroom.”

Ed started in on Sam.

“We don’t have it,” Sam said. “We gave you the prototype years ago.” At that time, Bette had sacrificed the “cow pie” she’d confiscated from Wink and him in France.

Ed said, “As I was telling Bette, it doesn’t do anything.”

“What is it supposed to do?” Sam asked. “Have you figured that out?”

“It’s completely inert. There is apparently no way to power it, to turn it on, to test it. It’s like”—he picked up his coffee mug—“this object, here. Doesn’t go beyond itself.”

“No one ever said it would,” Bette said.

“No,” Ed said doubtfully. “I guess not. But we think that something is missing. Some catalyst. We at least need a new set of plans.”

“Plans?” asked Sam. “What plans?”

“You must have a copy of the plans.”

“No.”

Ed lit his own cigarette with a sharp snap of his lighter, and inhaled as he returned the lighter to his pocket. He looked Sam in the eye. “I don’t believe you.”

“I can’t give you something I don’t have.”

Ed said, “Is it money? Because if it is—”

Bette stood up. “That’s it. Get out. Now.”

Ed stubbed out his cigarette. “If that’s the way you want it.”

“We’re not doing this for money. We—both of us—have devoted the past twenty years of our lives to our country.”

Ed said, “Maybe you’re getting money from someone else.”

He was beginning to get to Sam. “Listen, you moron—”

“Sam!” said Bette. “Ed, here’s your hat.”

Ed looked back and forth between them, then walked down the hallway to the door, stooped and silent. Sam followed, opened the door, and let him out.

In the kitchen, Bette was sitting on the floor, running her hands over the bottom of the table. Sam upended Ed’s chair. Together they combed the hall, the front door. They found one bug next to the wall phone in the kitchen and set it on the table between them.

“I can’t believe he said that,” said Bette, speaking to the bug.

“I wish we had some plans,” said Sam. “I really wish we did.”

“Megan, don’t climb up next to the phone with that Coke. You’re going to spill it. Get down off that stool right—” Bette dropped the device into a glass of water. It exuded a stream of miniscule bubbles as it sank.

Bette said, “That was really tiny. They’re getting better.” They went out onto the back porch and closed the door. She lit another cigarette. “They’re also getting a lot more pushy. You’re absolutely sure that Ed is wrong?”

“I checked it just last week. Nothing’s happening.”

A few days later, Sam and Bette were sitting in the living room watching
Hawaiian Eye
when the kids filed downstairs.