In War Times (7 page)

“Want more?” Diz asked Wink and Sam as he packed up. “We’re heading over to Monroe’s. The party is young.”

On the street, walking through cold drizzle, Wink peppered Dizzy with questions. “What do you call this stuff you play?”

“Modern jazz. You didn’t do too bad. How’s that?”

Wink said, “Don’t know. I play the violin, though.”

“Classical background. Music theory. That helps.”

“It sounds like you’re doing a lot of augmented thirteens.”

Parker, who so far had walked ahead of them, constantly looking up and down the street, turned his head. “That’s right. Ever heard of Stravinsky?”

“Yeah. In fact—”

“This way.” Bird herded them toward a dark alley. Sam balked, and Bird said, “You know that the military put Harlem off-limits to servicemen?” He gestured toward a shadowy figure at the end of the block. “There’s a cop down the street.”

Sam and Wink followed the jazzmen into the shadows, while Dizzy said, “You owe that guy money, Bird?”

“Aw, shut up.”

They entered Monroe’s Uptown House as the band—same guys that had left Minton’s earlier, Sam noted, plus a guitar and another trumpet—broke. “Might as well come on back,” said Parker. They followed Gillespie and Bird backstage through a warren of narrow hallways to a cramped dressing room where they stopped in the doorway. Bird and Diz found seats in the general disarray and got out their horns.

“This is what I’m talking about.” Diz played a few bars.

“Okay, yeah,” said Bird. They jammed a few minutes, trying out the idea.

“That’s like it. But faster,” said Dizzy. Parker tried his own changes.

The next set was tight, stellar, astonishing, their music what jazz, in Sam’s opinion, ought to be—pure improvisation within a framework heeded by only the slightest quote issued with a feathery touch or witty flourish. It was an entirely new music, in which each person made his own contribution, where individuality and freedom were the most important aspects, where each affected the other in a constantly changing fabric of sound—profoundly different than a canned solo in the middle of a big-band tune.

By seven
A.M.
, the audience was three, including themselves. Parker packed up and left while the others were still playing. From what he’d seen so far, Sam figured he was looking for a fix. At the end of the set, Dizzy said, “Come on over to my place.” Sam did not feel included in the invitation, and later learned that Diz often took musicians over to his house after playing all night to continue the jam.

Snow swept down the street in dense sheets as they watched the band of musicians vanish into whiteness, and a horse-drawn milk wagon passed, bottles jingling. Sam was pretty sure that this moment would always remain a high-water mark in his life.

Without a word they headed for the neon blur of a coffee shop. After hanging up their snow-encrusted coats and stomping off their boots, they slid into a booth. The place smelled of burnt coffee.

“What the hell would you call that?” asked Sam, after they’d sat silently for a few moments at the marred linoleum-topped table.

“Parker told us. Music. Just music.”

“Gillespie called it modern music, didn’t he?”

Wink grinned. “It’s modern, all right. Modern, right out of this world. Bird said something about ‘making it new.’”

“Making it new. Yeah. Needs to be done. Jazz was stultifying. So they’re doing it. But how?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.” Wink leaned forward on his elbows and stared at the tabletop.

The waitress slid a napkin, spoon, and coffee cup beneath his nose. “You want the coffee on your head or in the cup?”

Wink leaned back and allowed her to pour steaming coffee into his cup as he rubbed bloodshot eyes. “They’re using two different scales.”

Two different scales.
Two coinciding events, which come from their own pasts, share a few beats of unison, and then diverge into their own futures
. It sounded a lot like Hadntz’s model of time, if Sam’s interpretation was correct.

“Decided?” The waitress tapped her pencil against her pad.

“Well, look—honey, can I borrow that pencil?” Wink took it from her hand. “Thanks.”

“Anything else?” she asked drily.

“The forty-nine-cent special,” said Sam.

Wink nodded. “Me too.”

The waitress left.

“Okay.” Wink wrote the notes of the scale of C major on a napkin—C, D, E, F, G, A, B. “You got these notes and everybody thinks of them in terms of a scale. They’re uniform notes, the same frequencies—”

“The same chromatic event—”

“Yeah. But in a different scale, in a different setting, so to speak, a chromatic event can take on a different meaning. A different color. I mean, like in the scale of C, G is your fifth—the fifth note from C.”

“Yeah.”

“So if you flatten the G, it’s the same distance from both C’s. It’s called a trichord.” He drew a line between the F and the G and labeled it G-flat.

Sam visualized the black and white keys of the piano, heard them in his head. “Okay.”

“So think of the scale of G-flat.” He wrote on the napkin, G
^b
, B
^b
, C, D, E, F…

“Well…”

“Here.” Wink shucked his cornet from the cloth bag and played the scale of C major. “Now, G-flat. Now, the entire thirteen tones.” He gave them a quick run-through. The notes reverberated in the small room, hanging in the air for a second before fading.

“It sounds…Asian.”

“It’s the chromatic scale. Bird mentioned Stravinsky. His compositions use chromatic scales.” Wink put his trumpet to his lips and took a deep breath.

“Put that away, mister,” said the waitress, sliding their plates in front of them. “You’re disturbing the customers.”

“That bum?” asked Wink, nodding at a scruffy man bent over a cup of coffee at the lunch counter.

“It bothers the cook.”

“Genius at work,” said Wink, but he bagged the cornet. “Do you hear it now?”

Sam nodded. “A scale frames a note—frames a chord. Gives it a certain sound. A certain feel. A certain
resolution
.”

“Right. And?”

“You frame the same note with a different scale, it’s like…seeing the same thing from a different perspective.”

Wink nodded. “It’s like you’re setting the notes free. It still makes musical sense, but in a whole new way. You’re hearing every note in a whole new light. Other composers besides Stravinsky have done it. Not often, though. I’ve never heard it in jazz. These eggs are cold. Waitress!”

“They were hot when I brought them,” she said from a stool at the lunch counter, and continued to page through the newspaper.

“So you’re really combining two different scales to get new intervals. A new resolution. New chords.”

“Not necessarily
played
but, yeah,
there
. You
hear
them. They
resonate
.”

The way events that happened halfway around the world resonated here. Forming a fabric of meaning and being.

The way Pearl Harbor had set Sam on his strange course, which might yield a music as yet unhearable.

Sam sat through the first class of basic electricity, which lasted three weeks, and got perfect scores on every test. His notes were perplexing even to him, when he examined them later—a running record of how electrical theory, which he already knew backward and forward from his college years—fed into and supported Hadntz’s theories. Afterward, he had been advanced to the next class. Three weeks later, he was called to the CO’s office.

“I’ve just had a look at your records, Dance,” the CO said. “You’ve had three years of chemical engineering, and we’ve had you in Introductory Electricity, Part Two, for three weeks. You trying to waste the Army’s time?”

“No, sir.” Just trying to extend this warm, dry, passable-chow interlude as long as possible, and ferret out a place in mind and in a physical location to do his own work: to build the Hadntz Device, the HD.

The CO shuffled papers and found the one he wanted. “Part of your time in Washington is available only on a need-to-know basis.”

“I wasn’t aware of that.”

“I need to know. What were you doing?”

“I suggest that you ask the Army. I’m not sure myself.”

He glowered. “Well, look, we’re putting you right on the M-9 lectures. Got people coming down from Bell Labs to lay it all out.”

“What’s the M-9?”

“Replaces the M-7. Classified.”

Sam had had training on the M-7 Director, a fire-laying assembly which required several men to work as a team in order to send a missile to hit a moving target. Each time it was fired, the team had to calculate the trajectory, and custom-cut the fuse. It was time-consuming and not very accurate. “I assumed that everything here was top secret.”

“Good. Dismissed. And Dance?”

Sam turned in the doorway.

“I suggest you get with the program.”

Sam refrained from laughing until he was outside.

The M-9, it turned out, was the result of research at MIT, Princeton, and Bell Labs—the work of the most brilliant minds available to the war effort. Their goal had been to develop an electronic calculating artillery director capable of much higher precision (plus or minus two yards at 40,000 feet) than the mechanical calculation produced by the M-7 Director.

The first lecture started after lunch.

“When an electrical current flows through wire in a coil it develops a magnetic field that changes direction at sixty cycles a second. The changing voltage pushes the rotor around.” The Bell Labs lecturer, Dr. Bitts, held up an object.

“This is a selsyn regulator. Of course, you guys all know what a selsyn is. Who’s going to tell me? You, Hellman?”

Silence.

“It’s a device that transmits the angular position in the generator to a motor.”

They filed out around six; the men headed toward the mess hall and Bitts headed in the other direction. As of one accord, Wink and Sam caught up with him.

“Buy you a beer?” asked Wink.

“I’ve got an hour to kill before my car gets here. Can you get into the officer’s canteen?”

“With you we can.”

They found an empty booth and ordered beer. “That was interesting,” said Sam.

“I’m just getting started.”

“I’ve been thinking about something for quite some time,” said Sam. “If you send out radio waves and bounce them off a target, you could get back information about direction and speed. But you’d need something with a lot of power to focus the signal. I don’t know how you’d overcome that problem. Could this M-9 have something to do with it? I mean, what’s powering it?”

Bitts looked at Sam, then at his watch. He slid from the booth with briefcase in hand and grabbed his hat with the other one. “Got to go. Thanks for the beer.” They watched him walk with what seemed special haste through the evening crowd and out the door.

“What was that all about?” asked Wink.

“Just an idea I’ve been mulling over.”

The next day Sam and Wink were called into the CO’s office. “Bitts seems to think that you two have knowledge of a top-secret project and were trying to pump him for information last night.”

Sam and Wink looked at each other.

“You were talking about some kind of reflective radio device,” Wink said helpfully.

“That’s right,” said the CO.

Sam wanted to strangle Wink. It was not to be the last time. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about, but there’s a power problem.”

The CO made some notes. “This is all your own idea.”

“Yes. But it’s pretty obvious. I’m sure that a lot of other people have been thinking along the same lines.”

“Not
that
many people,” said Wink, as they headed back to their interrupted class.

“What?”

“Apparently not that many people have been thinking about radio reflections.”

“I guess they have,” said Sam. “Only we aren’t supposed to know it.”

Two men in suits came to talk to them, and once again, the blonde, Major Elegante. Again, she asked no questions. Just took notes. When she left, Sam still didn’t know what her voice sounded like.

After a week, they were again in the now-familiar office of the CO. “Okay,” he told them, after they’d saluted and sat down. “You’ve been turned inside out and deemed not to be involved in industrial sabotage or spying.”

Sam started from his chair. “My brother—” His voice shook.

“I apologize. I know about your brother. Please sit down. You’ll soon see why this evaluation was necessary.”

Sam sat on the edge of his chair and wasn’t sure what to do with his hands, which wanted to punch the CO in the face. He gripped his knees.

“Okay, look. You and Winklemeyer, having been duly evaluated, have been cleared to receive classified information. Bitts will brief you at “oh-five hundred” tomorrow. Classroom C.”

“But—” Wink began to say in what was clearly a protest.

The CO silenced him with a look. “I don’t want you guys to get swelled heads, but somebody has decided that you’ve got the smarts and you’re to receive special attention. I disagree with that evaluation; your behavior doesn’t show it. But I’ve been overruled.”

“He actually apologized,” said Wink after they left, this time with an order not to discuss their technological thoughts with anyone.

“He damned well better.”

“They expect me to be up at that hour on a
Sunday
?”

Sam was thrilled.

A guard was posted outside the classroom; he waved them in, looking irritated—no doubt for the same reason Wink, bleary-eyed, was irritated. “Please close the door,” said Bitts. Heat hadn’t made its way into the room yet, and he still wore his overcoat. The heavy oak school table at which he sat held an insulated coffee pot, and Sam noted with satisfaction that they’d been thought of: three cups and saucers were there, along with notepads and pencils, and a plate of Danishes.

“Morning,” said Bitts. “Help yourselves.”

“Absence of ‘good’ noted,” said Wink, pouring his coffee.

Bitts looked at Sam. “You’re the fellow who wondered about the energy source.”

“Right.”

“It’s called a cavity magnetron. It was invented by two Brits, Boot and Randall, and was offered to us as a down payment for the exchange of war information. It was brought here under the highest conditions of secrecy.” He smiled. “In a suitcase, which they kept under a bed at their hotel.”