In War Times (5 page)

He began to study her papers once again, trying to make sense of the equations, as well as her stilted English. Some of the papers were in German; he would have to have them translated. But by whom?

As the night continued, time disassembled, became sharp, discrete scenes. Keenan, a freckle-faced kid, running ahead of him on the path to the Puzzle River, turned and grinned, his face a heartbreaking pale flash, a mere glimpse. Keenan hollering,
Just swing out and let go of the rope! The water will catch you! Jump!

If he could build and use this mythical device proposed by a mysterious, mystical genius, could he change what was happening to his brother right now? He continued reading Hadntz’s papers:

If, as I believe, everything is physical, then time must have a shape. Proposed: to discover the shape of time, and use that information, conjoined with information about how life changes matter—
we
are matter talking and thinking—and use those discoveries in a technological fashion, to improve humanity. To end human suffering. Something organic—live—presupposes a seed, a germ that contains the genetic program of the entire organism. Life unfolds according to time, in a rhythm.

He put the paper down. If he could he insert the seed that might change this present, where would he do it?
Here
…or
here
? How would he know? What havoc might he reap, what lives might he shatter? Where, in these papers, did she consider this?

Yet—he
would
do it. He would swing out now, on the end of the rope, unafraid, and arc through the hot summer day, or through suddenly fractured history, where death reached in without notice, snatching loved ones—if he only knew how.

His head dropped onto the desk, but he battled sleep, fearing nightmares, while listening to the radio for any scrap of news about what might be happening to Keenan Dance.

But as the radio poured news of fire and explosions into his ears, he dreamed of bright childhood, the glinting river, the cornfields of Ohio, where Keenan ran, parting the great, tall rows, toward the Puzzle River.

The next morning, he was pulled out of class, this week with a plump, bald German refugee, and taken to a small room in the basement. He was seated on a chair while two men in suits sat on a desk like mirrors of each other, both with one leg on the floor, and asked him questions about Hadntz’s visit and demanded to know about their affair and where she had gone. A blond woman, a Major Elegante, was also there, taking notes, sitting on a chair in one corner, but she didn’t speak and barely glanced at Sam.

“Well,” he said, “it just happened very quickly. I can’t explain it.” He held up his palms in question. “Who knows what love is, how it happens?”

“Love!” One of the men actually snorted.

“You don’t think she could love me?” he asked. “Why not?”

“I think we’re getting sidetracked,” said Suit Number Two.

“She is a very beautiful woman,” said Sam. “It wouldn’t be proper for me to say much more about it. You say she’s gone?” He slumped back into his chair, shook his head. “After all that. How could she just leave?” He looked at them sharply. “Maybe something’s happened to her. She must have had some kind of accident. Maybe she’s in trouble. Are you looking into it? I didn’t do anything to her. I mean—”

“Look,” said Number One. “Just let us know if she gets in touch, okay?”

He was relieved when they did not question him further.

He had already determined that, whatever the cost, however complicated, and no matter what the roadblocks, he would figure out Hadntz’s plans.

And use them.

The Washington, D.C., course in which Sam had been enrolled was abandoned: Every serviceman had to be a soldier now, first and foremost. And, Sam thought, perhaps the professors suddenly had a more urgent task. Or his contact with Dr. Hadntz was suspect, and he was to be trusted with no more secrets. In the fashion of the Army, they had of course not been told what the course was intended to do, but he was certain that he and his classmates now had more information about certain aspects of theoretical physics, codebreaking, and other classified information than most people in the Army.

Whatever the reason, within a week he was on the train back to Camp Sutton, in North Carolina.

On the way, he was given leave to go back to Middleburg, Ohio, for Keenan’s funeral. It was a disorienting slice of time from the past, with all the old neighbors, except that Keenan was absent.

Even Keenan’s body was absent from Katzan’s Funeral Home on 5th Street, where his large family gathered.

Keenan was permanently entombed in the USS
Arizona
.

B
ACK AT CAMP SUTTON
, Sam began to write his stories of the war down for Keenan. Or anyone, really, just someone, some target for his profound loneliness, as if Keenan had been his twin. He tried not to hope that the strange papers he’d been given might open a history in which he could see his brother again. But some future Keenan was the one he kept in mind as his audience.

Writing his narratives was a way of keeping Keenan alive in his own mind.
You are still there
—
somewhere
. And there was also the feeling that Sam had to live more fully, absorb every detail with enough appreciation for two, because he was fortunate enough to still live, because his eyes were still filled with color, his ears with sound, his mind with thoughts.

This was my war, he would tell his brother. This is what I did to defeat our enemies, to take the world through the war, past the war, and then to continue the fight. This is what I saw and what I learned.

It was a wildly sunny day, false spring, his mother would call it, with white clouds scudding across a brilliant blue sky and bare tree branches waving as if their reawakening was already a fact, though snow was predicted in a few days.

Sam took a seat and surveyed his new waypoint as the train made slow progress inward—barracks, offices, test facilities, labs, and big guns. Lots of them.

After a short walk from where the AB&F dropped him off, Sam stepped into a barracks room about a hundred and fifty feet long and forty feet wide, with a worn wooden floor and many tall, narrow windows. He checked his orders: This was the right place, and a loud one. Soldiers shouted back and forth to one another, meeting and greeting and arranging their belongings, as they banged open their footlockers, cursed and bantered with cigarettes hanging from their lips, bluing the air with smoke.

He saw two rows of very public cots, and at one end of the barracks a private room for the senior NCO, which had a very luxurious appointment: a door, presently closed. Sam stood next to the shower room and toilets. The whole place smelled of a thorough, recent cleaning with bleach.

It was more promising than Camp Sutton, where there had not been a minute of time nor an appropriate place to examine Hadntz’s papers or even properly mourn his brother’s death. His entire hometown had turned out for Keenan’s memorial service, but he’d been accorded only two days to travel there and back. Keenan still seemed strangely alive, still present, somehow. Perhaps that was the importance of seeing the body of the deceased—to fully know that life, whatever it was, had departed. By now, a black-marbled school composition book that held his missives to Keenan was almost full. He’d have to pick up a few more at the PX.

But right now he had a non-canvas roof over his head, and heat that would not rage out of control and kill them, as had happened to some unfortunate soldiers in Camp Sutton when a jammed stovepipe set a tent on fire. After he’d threaded through his fellow soldiers, chosen a cot beneath a window, made the bed, and arranged his belongings in the footlocker, he got out his book of the moment,
The Thin Man
. Lying on his cot, he became absorbed in the novel, able to ignore the surrounding curses, the dull, constant boom of munitions, and any tone of voice that might presage his being asked to perform some task. When lost in a book, he could sometimes even stop thinking about Keenan.

When a duffel bag thumped onto the cot next to him, he didn’t look up.

“This
sure
as hell beats a tent in the pouring rain.”

Sam had never actually seen the man who possessed this particular voice—a nasal New York accent, used heartily, full of good cheer and humor, though often tinged with dark irony. But he had heard it every morning for weeks at Camp Sutton, often in the same scenario: Freezing rain creeps down Sam’s neck. It is still dark at Camp Sutton; the appellation “morning” seems misapplied. The first sergeant barks out names down the line while the company clerk holds an umbrella over him.

“Wellman.”

“Here, sir!”

“Winklemeyer.”

Silence.

“WINKLEMEYER!”

The spring-stretching sound of a screen door opening. “Yo!”
Slam
.

It had been like that every morning, rain or shine. The man with the New York accent never did get out of bed for roll call.

Winklemeyer, in the flesh, had put in an appearance.

Of medium height, slightly stocky. Sandy hair, reddish complexion. A short, faint scar above his left eye. Sam later learned it was the result of an imprudent mixing of certain chemicals in his father’s lab when he was fifteen. Mischievous blue eyes, which he turned on Sam.

“Al Winklemeyer. Wink for short.”

“Sam Dance.”

“Good book?”

Sam held it up so he could see the title.

“Hammett is a helluva writer. Let me borrow it when you’re through.”

Sam hadn’t run across many people in the service who liked to read. “Sure.”

“Like jazz?”