In War Times (52 page)

The car sped off down the street.

On the trip to the bank, Sam became so agitated at the delay caused by construction on New York Avenue that the cab driver threatened to throw him out. When they finally pulled up to the house, after what seemed like hours, Sam tipped him hugely.

The box was intact, the HD10 inside—the malleable plastic substance as well as the thin gray card Wink had given him on Midway.

He paced by the phone; he went to Jill’s room to go over the
Gypsy Myra
comics and the Warren Commission report; he made coffee. He became very angry at Bette, then calmed down again. He stepped out on the back porch and was enveloped by spring. He went down toward the garden.

It was not as though Sam had never felt this way before—that something of great import beyond control was about to happen. He’d felt this way plenty of times during the war. But now it all had more pressure, an edge so sharp it cut his being in the place where Jill lived.

He stood at the entrance of his garden, delicately beautiful in its springtime regenesis. The rush of the creek added another dimension, as did the thrush and the mockingbird and the other myriad singers, threading notes into a tapestry of sound which was made whole by scent and vision.

And yet…and yet…

He could walk into it. He could become a part of it, one of the weavers and at the same time one of the threads.

His entire history lay not
behind
him, but always
around
him and
within
him, waiting to manifest itself, over and over again, in bits of memory that infused his awareness of the present. He was never without that past, those bubbles of time through which he sailed again and again, constantly. Like his own consciousness, his own time, this history was not something he could see from the outside. No map could replace experience. No map could hold that much information.

He got as far as the apple tree, gloriously white with blossoms, and stood there. And, for an instant, just like in one of Bette’s Chinese poems, he disappeared, and only the blossom was there.

And yet…some future was here as well, influencing this present. Many futures, he supposed, infinite futures. He felt alive. His very body was permeable, and this was a joyous, light feeling, an openness.

Memories once again stacked up and said this is always happening, this Washington, this time. Driving slowly up Rhode Island Avenue on a midsummer Sunday afternoon, shops and houses known and familiar and the home of his mind. Then
this
was happening—the green and pink striped wallpaper in his mother’s kitchen, a huge bouquet of yellow dahlias next to the sink, the clear glass vase shimmering with a narrow, precise reflection of the icebox. And the face of Keenan Dance, eighteen years old, sure and not that of a boy, when he said, like Brian, but in that other kitchen, “I’ve enlisted.”

But—what
future
? What future did Sam feel? What future pressed upon his mind; what did he hope for?

It was a future in which Jill was safe again, returned to the normal currents of the world. He yearned for this with a cellular precision that searched and fired with neurological certainty, drawing him onward into the mysterious medium called time, which was biology, emotion.

He heard a deeper music then, and descended on one of the paths he’d built through his stand of brilliant tulips. Rocks he’d wrestled from the creek anchored visages, offered places to stop and sit and breathe as the garden opened and opened, not formal but weaving and drawing him onward. It was impossible, he thought, that this, that
life
, all gardens, of all kinds, gardens of thought and of science and of love and labor, should end because of human folly and human ignorance.

Where
was Hadntz’s new world? Where was the fix of which she’d spoken to him twenty-five years ago, just a few blocks away, in the rooming house off 14th Street, that fix which spoke of the underpinnings of mind and a new-made core of being—something that, if Bette was right about Hadntz’s involvement with Jill, Hadntz herself seemed to lack? For why else would she put Jill at risk?

As he descended on the path, the source of the music finally came into view. There, on the arched bridge, was Wink.

Wink was playing a lively, twining music on his cornet, filled with leaps and gaps and resonances, with overtones that slipped into time and lingered, which one heard and yet could never hear, those phantom vibrations that Bird, with his special mind, did hear, and which he then did play. Maybe he and Wink could finally make real the resonances of time, play those unplayable notes.

Wink was gazing up the creek, into the massive, dark viaduct that carried it beneath ten blocks of city. A fresh smell always issued from this place, one of wet concrete and water unmixed with street runoff, just pure creek. Above, the world of the present rumbled over the viaduct on his residential street.

Sam had always forbidden the kids to enter the viaduct, but of course they did. It was not dangerous except perhaps in flood times, and from snakes or other creatures or from the slipperiness inside. He’d never really worried about them.

But now, he thought, this tunnel leads somewhere mysterious, some place that might be lost when childhood ended. Some place adults could never see, save those gifted with Hadntz’s new chemicals of mind. Every path leading outward seemed just as infused with possibilities.

Wink stowed his cornet in a bag hung on his shoulder. “We’re to meet Bette,” he said.

“Where?”

“At a little airstrip in Virginia. She’s got a plane there she brought back from Germany some time ago.”

As he stood in the cool wind rushing from the viaduct, Sam had a vision of walking into the tunnel and coming out in the Messerschmitt caves, where the HD4 he’d planted long ago had grown into, not an atomic airplane, a perpetual city of war that would never land, but a sleek machine that slipped through time like pure electrons, shaking hands with otherwhen, shifting what he now thought was the past, realigning information. Somehow, he’d known that was happening, or might happen. Now it had, and his very children were at stake.

But they were not just
his
children. They were Lise, Karl, all the children of war, of poverty, most of them never to blossom. They were an effervescent music, their minds emanating thought, vision, possibility—love and happiness, like the refrain in Jill’s rock music. And, as they grew, they would be scarred, and scarred again, when that love was not returned.

Wink said, “Seeing all this makes me think that time is like a garden. Some flowers are picked and some flowers stay to seed. New species evolve. New strains of everything. Making it new is everything. Time reaches backward and forward and in directions of which we cannot really conceive because our brains, large as they are, are really very small.”

Yes, this was the old Wink. This was the way he talked.

They were making their way up the creek as Wink spoke, and reached the viaduct. They scrambled up the hill to the road and Wink waved down a cab.

S
AM RODE THROUGH
Washington, where he had spent so many years, with a sense that it was disappearing, all the riot-fired corners still not rebuilt; the bright white edifices of government, the offices where he’d spent years of his life.

That time was dissipating like a vapor, a particular fragrance composed of stale coffee, mimeograph ink, the perfume of secretaries, even the smell of paper clips bunched in the top drawers of massive metal desks. It was also the smell of thought, of seeing firsthand the technological wonders of his time, the fruit of scientific thought made real, an incense rising from this world center that could either destroy time or make it whole and new.

They crossed the 14th Street bridge as part of the rush of traffic, passed the Pentagon, and merged into the George Washington Parkway, which twined and flowed along the banks of the Potomac like string, like a new form of time, one that would take them to Bailey’s Crossroads in suburban Virginia. Not in a day of summer tarrying lostness on narrow country roads but on new straight roads, in businesslike minutes, between impermeable strips of the new shopping centers which had replaced singular, distanced stores and isolated country houses.

Wink spoke as they moved through the circles of time surrounding the city—Alexandria, Shirlington, Lincolnia—but Sam did not really notice what he said and then they were nearly in the country. Wink bade the driver turn off Columbia Pike at the Coca-Cola plant, just past Dawes Avenue, and there was the airstrip, Bette, and her plane. She ran to the gap in the sagging fence where one walked onto the field and met them.

“Hurry,” she yelled as Wink paid the cabdriver. “We just might make it.”

“Where’s Jill?” asked Sam. “Is she with you? I was hoping you’d found her.”

“No,” said Bette, who was miraculously able to run across the airfield in high heels. “She’s not here. Thanks to Dr. Hadntz. Or, as Jill thinks of her, Gypsy Myra. Some sort of…hippie guru magical gypsy woman. A ‘madwoman of time,’ as issue number four states.” Her voice was as hard and as unforgiving as the surface of water when one fell into it from a hundred feet above.

“What in the world have you got on?” They stopped at the plane, panting.

“Just a nice, low-key Christian Dior suit.”

“You hardly look like yourself. Great makeup job. And that hair—how did you do that?”

“Trade secret. It’s not easy.” She herded them up the ladder, and told Sam to sit next to her. “You’re the copilot, Sam. Wink’s in back.” She closed the hatch.

“Me?” said Sam. “But Wink knows—”

“No,” she said. “It’s you and me, Dance. We’re finishing our mission. Together. Okay. Give me the HD10.”

Bette pressed a small cube of HD 10 into a portal in the dash of the plane.

There were no dials in the plane. It was smaller, more delicate and light, than the plane in the game. Information flowed through its skin, ran through its body, and manifested in a panel in front of him. There was the azimuth, the elevation, and measurements of several new dimensions of which he’d never heard, apparently being translated much like the M-9 Director had translated polar coordinates into rectangular coordinates, instantly. A small keyboard was mounted to Bette’s left; she typed in their present place and date, May 4,1970, and then Dallas, November 22, 1963.

“How in the world does that work?” he asked.

“You’re the engineer. I’m sure that there are a lot of calculations taking place behind those numbers. We’re probably all just some unimaginably huge calculation ourselves, embedded in the universe. We are the quantum computer.”

They took off from the tiny, rural airstrip with none of the rumbling heaviness Sam was used to in military airplanes. For a moment, he looked out on bright green rural Virginia, the Blue Ridge, and then the windows were filled with color and form, sometimes sharp and discrete, sometimes blossoming like fireworks. Sound accompanied them, almost like a form of free jazz, linked to the colors, but changing too quickly to grasp anything, too fast for Sam’s mind to find a pattern or anticipate a change.

Bette, intent on her controls, said, “This is a lovely plane to fly. Radar doesn’t pick it up; I found that out on practice flights in Germany. But it’s dangerous to land; I don’t think it’s meant to. I had to fight to get it down every time, like I was fighting wind shear. It’s like the rocket plane; simply a focused weapon, or the atomic plane, not meant to land, but just cruise. Cruise and sample and emanate and transmit and fix. Fix time again and again, inoculate it as each new virus of war is generated.”

“Where does the fix come from?”

Wink said, “I think it comes from us, really. It’s focusing on a particular outcome and adjusting the variables to create that particular place, that particular
when
. It’s a sum.”

“This is not World War Two technology.”

“You left something in the Messerschmitt cave, Dance. A piece of Hadntz’s time machine. Just like the game board, it mutated. It found the necessary shape. It’s just an interface, really. Maybe what it really changes is…us.”

“How did you get it out of the cave? When it was built, the cave had a huge entrance, and a road for taking out the completed planes. But we blasted all that shut.”

“Someone in the organization informed me that a local resident claimed to have found a plane in the old Messerschmitt caves. They had a wild tale about it being a Nazi ‘superweapon’ prototype that never really did anything, but since I was familiar with the area they asked me to deal with it.

“When I saw it, I was flabbergasted. I spent lots of secret government slush fund money to have the road reopened. I took it out, down to the airstrip at the base, and kept everybody the hell away from it—and had the cave closed up again. It took me quite a while to figure out how to fly it as a regular plane. In the process, I realized exactly what it was.”

“What is it?” asked Sam. “I mean, it looks like a plane, but—”

“I guess you could call it an M-Infinity Director.”

“Instead of the M-9 Director?” asked Wink.

“Exactly. It uses the same principles, but they are infinitely evolved, apparently hooked into whatever supercomputers exist in Hadntz’s…when, and it tracks a moving target, which is time itself.”

“Why doesn’t the CIA know what it is?” asked Sam.

“I turned in a lot of fake reports. Flew it here to Bailey’s Crossroads and kept it in a private hangar. Ed Mach suspected something, and had me put through the ringer when I brought it back. That’s when I was gone for two weeks. Part of that time was for healing up.”

Sam grasped her hand tightly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“So they could get their hands on you too? I’m a tough old bird, Dance. It was worth it. This is a lot more useful than the game board. I think that the board must be giving Jill continuously updated information about what to do, how to get there. But she’s in terrible danger. She’s blundering into one of the most tightly constructed conspiracies the world has ever known. If she gets in their way…”