In War Times (51 page)

“How?” asked Sam.

The plane manifested dials that purported to control dimensional aspects that none of them had ever heard of before, but which Brian attended to with a mixture of delight and wonder. “Okay,” he said. “We’re going to perform some corrections. Megan, get over here. You’re in charge of azimuth. Sit in that chair behind Mom. Jill, you’re—I don’t know. The radio guy. Keeping us all in touch. There are a lot of…factors here.”

“I think we’re heading for a major quantum event,” said Megan, frowning. “Something having to do with Bohr’s interpretation.”

“Where spooky effects at a distance are actually manifested,” said Hadntz.

“Right.”

“Isn’t every instant a major quantum event?” asked Wink.

They all laughed. With that, the tension vanished.

“No, I mean it,” he persisted. “It’s just that when we’re in this mode, we are more able to know it.”

“Like monks regulating their brain waves and heartbeat,” mused Bette.

“But even further in,” said Hadntz. “Not even at a cellular level. At an atomic level.”

“Look, Mom,” said Brian. “We’ve been playing the game for years now. We
know
where you and Dad and Wink and Dr. Hadntz were. We’ve
been
to those camps.”

“Oh, God,” she murmured. “I suppose it’s a little too late to be irritated with your father for leaving that thing lying around.”

“And this is what we have to do,” said Jill. “We have to put it in the guns. The anguish that a single death causes. So that when someone, anywhere, picks up a gun, their empathy will get ratcheted up a millionfold.”

“That’s just one thing. We also have to put it in the kids,” said Brian. “Kids have to understand that the pain
they
feel is the same as the pain that
others
feel. You know, like the kids in Dickens’s books are brutalized by adults, and when you read the books, you feel for them.”

Sam looked at Brian in surprise; he’d complained bitterly at having to wade through Dickens.

“We have to bridge that gap, then,” said Bette. “We have to give everybody some kind of touchstone of decency, so that they are able to do what needs to be done to set things right. Some story that they can hold on to.”

“You have to spin that dial, there,” said Brian.

Spin the dial?

Sam suddenly realized that it was, really, a game. His sense of claustrophobia, of terrible doom, vanished. “This game’s over,” he said.

He experienced a moment of falling, as if the plane was going to crash.

Then the family was at the table again, the game board in front of them.

Sam looked around. Wink was gone.

Bette was pale and breathing hard. Jill and Megan were the age they’d been when they started playing.

“Who was that woman?” asked Megan. “She seemed to know a lot about physics.”

“That was Gypsy Myra,” said Jill. “You’ve seen her before. Don’t you remember?”

“Where’s Wink?” asked Sam.

“He got up and left a minute ago,” said Jill. “He said he couldn’t stay.”

Sam pushed back his chair and looked out the window. “Which way did he go?”

Sam decided that Wink must have caught a taxi to otherwhen, otherwhere, the other timestream that so weighed on this one, where the war had still not ended, where his son was in it, where his daughter was fighting against it.

This time, he knew exactly where to find that place.

He got in the car, careened through town, parked illegally. As he approached the door, the music got louder.

The party was still in full swing. A shout went up when he walked in the door. “Hey!” said Alberteen, putting his arm around Sam’s shoulder. “We’ve been looking for you. It’s time for the Perham Downs to play.”

Sam wasn’t really in the mood. “Have you seen Wink?”

“He’s up on the goddamn stage, waiting for you.”

Sam made his way through the happy, drunken crowd and climbed up on the stage to confront Wink, who was running through scales. On the way, someone slapped an Army hat on his head, handed him a jacket that had his bars on it.

All right.

He shrugged into the jacket; straightened the collar. “Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” he asked Wink.

“Couldn’t. It’s just packets of information.” He handed Sam a tenor sax.

“Packets of information with
emotion
,” said Sam. “Right now this packet of information has a strong urge to punch you.”

Wild Card Zee stepped up and took his place behind the drums, dusted the hi-hat, made an exploratory
ker-plunk
on the bass drum.

“Reeds, anyone?” asked Kocab, his clarinet under his arm. His hair was white, and he was thin and wiry.

“Thanks. They’ll sound real good right out of the box.” Sam kicked himself for not even thinking about bringing his own saxophone, and his own carefully prepared reeds. He’d just been so worried. He held the reed up to the light, then pulled out his pocketknife and trimmed it a bit.

“Quit farting around,” said Earl T. He played a few bluesy notes on the piano. “Couldn’t you have gotten this tuned?”

Grease plucked a few notes on his bass. “Remember Moonlight?” he said. “This is her. Shipped her home from England. Lovely old thing.”

“What are we going to play?” asked Earl T.

“‘Jazznocracy’,” said Sam, somewhat meanly.

“Can’t we warm up first?” asked Earl T.

Sam counted out the time. “One, two, three, four…”

Grease laid down a railroad rhythm with Moonlight, plucking fast. The train was speeding through the night, passing small towns, telephone lines, a light-filled flash carrying them all to war.

Wink moved in with the chilling trumpet solo, and the journey was begun.

They moved from place to place. Aberdeen, the Block, Duke Ellington, the top-secret cavity magnetron. The story of Sam and Wink had become the story of Company C; the story of Company C had become the story that would give humans access to the working of their minds.

After ten bars, Sam took off with a Bird-like riff, roller-coastering across the Atlantic, Wink close on his heels, repeating every blisteringly fast note perfectly. Then they merged in unison.

The train again, Alberteen keeping the beat.

They headed to Tidworth. Zee took care of the explosion as if he’d been there, grinning. Then Bletchley Hall, and Hadntz’s mysterious house in London. Wink picked up the mute and produced a strange, moody tone on his cornet, and then it was on to France.

Bette’s interrogation was a fast-talking dialogue in minor tones, and Earl T. put in the galloping hooves of Hadntz’s herd animals.

Germany was dark, dark as the revealed camps, the starved refugees.

For a few beats they just stopped, abruptly. For the death camps, there was only silence.

The Americans beat back the Germans, who descended abruptly until Zee echoed Hitler’s death-shot. An uproar of bebop joy.

Another silence for Hiroshima.

A final eruption as the train tracks rolled fast beneath them again. They were on their way home.

When they finished, Company C roared with applause.

It was one of Sam’s finest moments. The men lined up, took a quick bow, and headed into a long line of sentimental favorites and the steady dance beat, slow and fast, of the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

Sam and Wink made it back to Halcyon House well after dawn. Wink insisted it was all right, that the Hilbert spaces weren’t ready, and something about a torus, and complexity, and fruitfulness. He was drunk.

Wink fell onto the couch downstairs and Sam trudged up the stairs, where Bette welcomed him quite warmly. “Great performance, Dance,” she said.

“You were there?”

“Mm-hmm. I took Jill and Megan too. They were dazzled, completely impressed. It was quite fine.”

“The torus,” said Sam, and passed out.

They woke shortly after noon and were drinking Bloody Marys by the creek when Megan came running out of the house with the news.

“The National Guard just killed four students at Kent State,” she said, her voice high-pitched; nearly hysterical. “And Jill is gone!”

Sam jumped out of his chair. “Where?”

“I don’t know,” said Megan. “She just took the game board and left.”

Wink tossed his drink in the creek. He suddenly looked as if he had aged ten years. “Okay. Now I understand. I think I know where she went.”

“Where?” asked Sam, as they ran up to the house.

“She’s found the nexus. Or maybe it’s found her.”

S
AM WENT UP
to Jill’s room, the rest of them right behind him, and opened the door.

Her room was shockingly neat. On her drawing table was a pile of library books about the Kennedy assassination, and a note. “Please get this to Elmore to print and distribute. It’s VERY IMPORTANT.” Beneath it was a manila envelope.

Not pausing for moral niceties, Sam ripped open the envelope.

To his surprise, inside were a stack of drawings for several future
Gypsy Myra
issues.

He sat down and read them, quickly, and passed them around.

“Oh my God,” said Bette. “I guess she’s been planning this.”

“Is this what I think it is?” Sam asked, incredulous.

Bette lighted a cigarette. “It is. I think she’s going to try and use the device. The game board. To prevent the assassination of JFK. That’s here. Issue number seventeen.”

“Right,” said Sam, turning pages. “See, here—in Gypsy Myra’s world, Kennedy’s continued presidency would probably have made our present quite different. More like Wink’s. Space travel, education, international outreach, scientific development, communication, monetary changes—all kinds of subtle things would be different. But how the hell could
Jill
do anything?”

“It’s the nexus,” said Wink. “This is it. It could have been anything, but this is it. A battleground of forces.”

“Hadntz,” said Wink, tapping a drawing of Gypsy Myra. “Hadntz is going to help her.”

“Why Jill?” Sam paced the room, looked in the closet as if he might find her there.

“Why not?” said Bette, throwing down the comic she held. “Goddammit!” With shaking hands she tapped another cigarette from her pack and lit it. “Because we wouldn’t. We haven’t used the HD 10, actively, at all. What do you think the game board is—HD 15? Hadntz doesn’t need us anymore. It’s ticking away on its own; it has its own agenda. And remember, Hadntz told us that her daughter lives only in this timeline—unlike her—and this one looks pretty terrible, at least from Jill’s point of view, right now. Jill is a great target. A useful agent. Like you were, Sam, when she used you. Young, impressionistic, brave. Obviously more useful than us. We’re old, full of doubts. We have something to lose.”

Her hands no longer shook. She picked up another issue. “It looks like Jill has been working on this plan for a while. In fact…” Bette turned some pages. “Here it is. I thought I saw this. If Jill doesn’t do anything,” her voice caught, “Brian will die in a covert action in Cambodia.
This
is her dilemma. Something that she saw in one of the games, I’m sure.”

“Is that true?” asked Sam, horrified.

“You know as well as I do that it’s an averaging process. That is, not necessarily. She saw this all in the game board. Possibilities, probabilities, all jumping track eventually and leading to one final place. But…” Bette was pale as she set the comic back on the table.

She turned her attention to the huge stack of books on the table. “The Warren Commission report. Seems like most of the volumes are here. These are reference books—she must have snuck them out of the university’s library.”

She put her hands in her pockets and looked out the open window. The leaves of Jill’s jungle plants bobbed in the fresh spring breeze.

Sam could almost see the transformation, could almost see Major Elegante standing strong in her boots, her sidearm strapped on, cunning OSS weapons hidden everywhere, thinking of how to bring her own hopes to fruition using Hadntz’s plans.

She was making decisions, cutting through minutiae, moving faster, with purpose. “We have to know what she knows.” She stepped to the table, pulled out one of the books, and opened it to one of Jill’s bookmarks. “Okay. Here’s the map. Indentations—she’s traced it. Shows Kennedy’s route. She has the Warren Commission’s exhaustively reconstructed—and, by the way, fictional—timetable. Her plan is to thwart Oswald.

“The only problem is, he’s not the killer. She’s heading to the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository where—she thinks—one man with a rusty, outmoded weapon with a bad scope, three bullets, and a terrible vantage point is going to fire a bullet that will rip through Kennedy, ricochet through his body, and go on to injure Connally. We call it the magic bullet. It just didn’t happen. She just doesn’t have the correct information.”

“Well, Bette, what
did
happen?” asked Sam.

“I’m not at liberty to tell you, wiseass. But I will anyway, as soon as I have time.”

“How could she possibly get there?”

“The game board is the HD15. Or who knows. The infinite version, assembling all the information. How does Wink get here? He says he just turns a corner, right?”

Sam was behind her as she ran downstairs. “Where are you going?”

“I have to prepare some things.”

“I’m coming too.”

“No. You need to get the HD 10 from wherever you put it.”

“It’s in the bank. In a safety deposit box.”

“Good. Get it, and come back here. After that,
stay here
. Megan?”

Megan stood on the stairs. “I have to do something. I have to help Jill. What can I do?”

“I want you to stay with your friend Karen until we get back.”

“But Mom—”

Bette returned and gave Megan a long hug. “Honey, please. I really need you here. If—well, that’s all. I just need you here.”

She grabbed her purse. “Wink. Let’s go. We’ll need the car, Sam.”

“I’ll get a cab to the bank. Where are you going?”

Bette ran out the door. Wink followed.

“You tell me, Wink!” Sam yelled after them.

“I don’t know yet,” he shouted as he got in the car and slammed the door.