In War Times (37 page)

“Oh, yeah,” said Sam. He knew it was a minor local legend, one that these boys might try to match. “Can you imagine being out there on the track, the train whistles, you see it cross Route 3 there?”

“I’d just do what he did,” said Bobby. “Grab hold of the tie, swing down…”

“What if your hands slipped?” asked Sam.

“My hands don’t slip.”

Sam persisted, that day’s long-ago terror resurfacing. “What if the train was real, real long and your arms got tired?” That train had seemed endless as his brother hung there.

“My arms never get tired.”

“Well, what if a bug started biting you?” asked one of the other boys, taking up the game.

Bobby McElroy stuck his chin out. “What if no train came? What if I just walked across? I mean,” he said with a shrug. “It’s not like we don’t know the schedule, right?”

“You could always just
plan
on being on the track when the train comes, McElroy,” said Reds cap. “Isn’t that your plan?”

“Where’s your brother now, Mr. Dance?” asked Bobby McElroy. “I’ll tell my dad.”

Sam looked out at the trestle. “I don’t really know.”

It was then he realized that he’d been hoping to see him, down here, in the land of their shared childhood.

He turned and walked toward Route 3 on the crunching gravel of the C&O’s right-of-way.

When he got back to the house, he went to Keenan’s bedroom and sat on the bed. A model zeppelin hung from the ceiling; the radio he’d sent away for with cereal coupons and built sat on his desk, but his mother had set up her sewing machine in front of the window. She could look out at the orchard, see clumps of big-leaved rhubarb and a row of pink peonies as she made shirts, pants, dresses, and curtains. Sam imagined that, with grandchildren, she was once again busy with patterns, fabrics, and pins.

He thought about how the new radar system had been installed at Pearl Harbor, and about the fact that it had actually worked.

The man on the receiving end hadn’t reported it. That enemy planes might be approaching was a simple impossibility, beyond the scope of his imagination. A reality that simply didn’t exist, except when it came into sight a few minutes later, setting the harbor and airfields aflame, sending the ships to the bottom of the harbor, and it was too late.

What, precisely, was
he
trying so hard to ignore?

Keenan rose up around him, not visible, but a presence streaming upward, dense with time, event, thought, action. Though the bed, the desk, the dresser, and the sewing machine were still there, objects embedded in whatever “here” was, it was as if they were also streaming upward, downward, into infinity in all directions, to places and frequencies to which he was not tuned and to which he never could be tuned. They both existed and did not exist. Sam just sat there, somewhat bemused, simply experiencing it: the presence of Keenan, and his goneness, concurrently.

“It’s a pleasant room.” His mother touched his shoulder.

“What if you could change things,” he asked. “What if they could be…immeasurably better? Would you do it?”

“How could you ever know if they were really better, Sam?”

She could always get to the heart of things. “I’m not sure, Ma. I’m just not sure.”

“It would surely be better,” she said, sitting beside him and putting her arm around him, “if your brother were still here. Just about all we can do, though, is remember him.”

“At least we can do that.”

I
N WASHINGTON, D. C.
, throughout the 1950s, Bette and Sam kept their pact about not talking about the device—sometimes uneasily, sometimes wholeheartedly. United against disclosing anything to the CIA, they tried to start their family and made frequent trips to New York to assuage Sam’s hunger for live jazz. They got an apartment in Georgetown, and enjoyed Washington to the fullest.

They assumed Hadntz was dead.

Jill was born in 1950; Brian in 1952. Sam worked at the Navy Yard, where many government projects involving fire protection kept his interest.

Bette maintained a keen interest in world events. She still had relatives in the Soviet Union. “There’s not much difference between the Soviets and Nazis,” she said once, after receiving a particularly distressing letter, most of which was censored. “They have camps. They’ve killed millions. Many more millions than the Nazis, actually. I know things, Sam. I know things. And they’re horrible.” She was restless for weeks after that, in a perpetual black mood, saying that she should never have quit, that the war continued, that it would never end.

But they put all of their attention into raising their family. Megan was born in 1955. They were busy.

And then it changed.

One Sunday afternoon, Bette took the kids to the zoo, and Sam checked on the device.

He kept it in their town house’s basement, in a space he’d created by chiseling several bricks from the old wall and then hollowing out a hole behind. He visited the cobweb-draped comer about every six months, and between times resealed it in with mortar. Bette, of course, knew where it was—not that he’d told her, but after all, she was a spy. However, Sam felt that the bricks and mortar kept both of them from becoming obsessive. He had spent solid weeks, when he’d had vacations, trying to decipher the thing that had revealed the dimension in which Keenan lived, whether it was the past or the future. He wondered whether it had called forth the reunion, and Wink too. He put it through rigorous, methodical tests set up to isolate any property, any function he might have missed. He got out Hadntz’s papers, which had never been published, and pored over them, thinking of the whole thing as an intellectual exercise, a puzzle, trying to put his emotions aside and approach it rationally. But it appeared to be inert, as if its possibilities had been exhausted when it had shown him a glimpse of Keenan.

He could have created another lab, made another device, but it apparently required a nuclear reaction in order to function. The public was told of the tests at Bikini atoll, but if he’d wanted to get anywhere near it he’d have had to get permission from the government, and then he’d have to hand it over to the CIA. They might then be able to do…something. Something that might rock the foundations of the world, as had the atomic bomb, but even more drastically.

Was the risk he might have to take in order to create an unknown result—possibly good, but also possibly negative, in new, unanticipated ways—worth the price the rest of the world might have to pay?

And so he limited his compulsion to strictly delineated events, such as this Sunday afternoon check, when he was alone.

Setting his cold beer on a ramshackle table, he moved stacked-up boxes of books, got the ladder and his chisel, and to the background of a Sunday afternoon radio show, liberated the lead box. In his mind, never written down, were the series of tests he planned to perform this time.

He dropped into the ragged easy chair next to the table and opened the box that held the device.

It had changed.

Bewildered, Sam stared at the ivory-colored substance in the box.

Where was the tuning apparatus?

He pushed on the substance. It indented, then resumed its previous shape.

He set it on the table, got up, lighted a cigarette, and paced the small basement.

What did this mean
?

This evidence of its continued vitality, its continued evolution, shook him to his core. Memories of Wink and Keenan and all his old war buddies, all the old war stories, flooded back. England. The death camps of Germany, about which he still had nightmares. Their laboratories, smelling of chemicals and solder and heavy machine oil. Radio swing music; the Perham Downs. Bebop, Rafferty, bombs, fires, hunger, and disease.

The long, aching tale of war, still unfinished, which would not be finished, as long as humans remained unchanged.

He heard a sound and turned, startled.

“So,” said Bette. “Something’s happened.”

Something had happened.

The old fire planted by Hadntz had awakened.

“We can’t just throw it in the ocean, Dance, much as I’d like to,” she said, gazing down at it. She hugged herself, rubbing her hands up and down on her arms. “How do you think this happened? You’re the engineer.”

He laughed. “Believe me, I know nothing about this process. A lot of what Hadntz posited
is
real, and we know it now. DNA, developments in biochemistry. They’re discovering all kinds of subatomic particles. So maybe this change is just part of the process.”

“I think…we should go with it, Dance,” she said. “I mean, you should.” She abruptly started back up the stairs. “I think I hear Megan crying. She’ll wake them all up.”

She stopped on the third step, turned, and said, “I never saw this, and I don’t want to hear anything more about it.”

“Still.”

“Still. We are still at war, I am still a part of the war, and I don’t want them to even
think
that this thing really and truly exists. You have no idea what little signs people make that they are thinking about something, or know something. Even this is too much. But—I know things, and they are not good.” She had started to cry, which surprised Sam. She rarely cried. He climbed the stairs and embraced her tightly. She laid her head on his shoulder.

Megan cried again, this time angrily. Bette wiped her tears and said, “Please.”

Then she hurried up the stairs.

SOVIET FIRES EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE

—
New York Times
headline
October 4, 1957

∞

I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini.

—
P
AUL
D
ESMOND
alto saxophonist for Dave Brubeck
and composer of “Take Five”

A
ROUND DAWN
, the Big Island hove into sight, a massive green, white, and brown mountain swathed in cloud and set in an impossibly gemlike sea. From the air, few shallows appeared; the ocean dropped immediately to intense blue fathoms.

“Wake up,” Sam told his children. “Look out the window!” And then other islands appeared in the window, blazing green in the dawn, curving in a long line across the sea.

It was 1957. In the wake of the Sputnik launch, the Navy got the space program contract. Sam had landed the job of inspecting the installations of the satellite tracking stations being built throughout the Pacific, across the scattered islands that were now U.S. territory—Guam, Kwajalein, Midway; the Marshalls, the Marianas. The tracking stations would also do double duty as early warning systems for incoming enemy intercontinental missiles, part of the DEW line, the Distant Early Warning system. The Soviets had done as good a job appropriating German scientists and technology as had the Americans. The world was full of the descendents of the V-2, aimed at one another, this time with nuclear warheads.

He and Bette had both agreed that he should take the Hawaii job. It was not spoken, but Sam knew that Bette, as well as he, saw these developments in the Pacific in the light of the change in the device.

Room for them on the DC-3 had suddenly become available the night before. They boarded a bus where they had been billeted in San Francisco, then boarded the plane, Jill with her round white patent-leather case full of comics, Brian clutching little green Army men, their feet stuck to a green plastic puddle, Megan asleep on Bette’s shoulder.

The plane made a sharp turn, and Oahu was below. Waikiki, Honolulu, Hickam Air Force Base.

And Pearl Harbor, where Keenan lay, trapped within the
Arizona
forever. Sam covered his face for a moment as grief swept through him. Brian tugged at his sleeve. “What’s wrong?”

He took a deep breath. “I’m fine,” he said, and put his arm around Brian. “See? That’s where we’re going to live.”

“Really?” Brian sounded doubtful.

Bette went over the kids’ faces with a wet hankie and combed their hair. She told Jill crossly that no, she couldn’t wear her Davy Crockett hat this morning. “We have to look nice.”

“That’s why I want to wear it,” Jill said.

Half an hour after their first glimpse of the Hawaiian Islands, they stood on Hickam tarmac. A breeze whipped the kids’ hair, undoing Bette’s work.

A dark-haired man wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and dark slacks approached them. “Bill Eggston,” he said, holding out his hand. “Sam Dance?”

Eggston herded them through a huge open-ended concrete hangar with hundreds of seats.

“Where are we going to stay?” Bette was clearly exhausted. Megan woke, looked around, and wailed. “These kids need a place to sleep. Now.”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Dance.” They were through the terminal now, and out front. Palm trees, and flowers Sam did not recognize, were everywhere. Bill helped Bette and the kids into a blue Chevy. The driver said, “Aloha. Chet. And you are?”

“You don’t look Hawaiian,” Jill said accusingly, hauling her bag of comics onto her lap.

Chet laughed. “I’m not. I’m from Vermont.”

“Wait!” said Brian. “I lost Ralph.”

“I don’t see how you can tell those soldiers apart,” Jill told him scornfully.

Chet said, “How would you like to go to the beach?” As the car pulled away from the curb, Sam felt the brunt of Bette’s most exasperated look. He had to admit that the Navy didn’t seem all that able to understand the needs of a traveling family—particularly one that was not an enlisted family. And then they were gone.

“Any idea where he’s taking them?” asked Sam.

“Ala Moana, I think. And breakfast. Let’s take care of the paperwork.” Bill’s office was a pale and depressing shade of green, but a tantalizing flowery scent came in through the open window. A phalanx of battleship-gray file cabinets lined one wall. A picture of his wife, who looked Japanese, was on the desk. After they sat down with coffee, Bill unlocked a bottom drawer and took out a large envelope marked FYI. He slid it across the desk to Sam with no comment.