In War Times (8 page)

“Which is why you thought that we were spies trying to pump you for information,” said Sam.

“Now we know that you’re just thoughtful guys trying to solve the same problem we’ve been chasing for years,” said Bitts. “I’ve been authorized to fill you in on the details.”

“Why?” asked Wink.

“We’re going to need people in the field who know how the M-9 operates right down to the ground.”

“We’re the repair guys,” said Sam.

“You could say that.”

“Who’s working on it?” Sam asked.

Bitts pushed notepads and pencils toward them.

“It’s a collaboration between the military and private enterprise. I’m from Bell Labs. We developed the computer. MIT has what they call a Rad Lab and they’ve been developing the radio imaging—we’re calling it radar, for radio detection and ranging—and integrating the magnetron into it. A guy named Loomis—a good friend of mine, quite wealthy—is an amateur scientist. Brilliant. He’s been working, on his own and in conjunction with MIT, on the same problem you identified—how to generate the power we need to make radar more effective. Boot and Randall showed the magnetron to Loomis, and he grasped its importance immediately. He’s brought everything together, including getting it into quick production. G.E., Westinghouse, Sylvania—different companies have the contracts to manufacture the components. It generates extremely short microwaves, and we have about a thousand times more power available than before.”

“How?” asked Sam.

Bitts swung his briefcase onto the table, unlocked it, and took out a set of blueprints. Then he began to talk electronics and physics, and explained a major top-secret weapon of the war. Sam began his notes.

Bitts reached under the table and pulled out a cardboard box. Opening it, he took out one of the main technological advances that would later be credited with winning the war. Outside, the dim winter dawn brightened, causing the piece of metal to gleam.

“This is a resonant cavity magnetron.” Made of copper, the disk was about the size of a grandfather-clock pendulum. “It generates ten kilowatts of power and ten-centimeter radio waves.”

“So far we’ve been using—what?—about two meters?” asked Wink.

“Correct. Two meters works for vague, general imaging, but this has made much more accurate targeting possible. With this, even a U-boat periscope can be spotted.”

“Amazing,” said Wink. “And am I right in assuming that this opens us up to much shorter antennas?”

“That can be installed on bombers, yes.”

Sam did not say anything. He was stunned by how similar this magnetron was to the one described by Hadntz as a power source for her device, at least in output. It had been one reason he had begun to think it was just a fairy tale. He believed there was no such device.

Now there was. Sam picked it up and examined it.

Bitts gave them detailed information about how it worked; about how electrons were tunneled around its circular core by a magnet. He told them, briefly, about another component of the M-9 system: the proximity fuse. Merle Tuve, a Carnegie-based physicist who bought his own black powder at a Georgetown shop and made his own vacuum tubes, had developed it. The prototype had recently been tested at the firing range in Dahlgren, Virginia. The fuse, which had a radio-controlled detonator, sent a spark when it was
near
a target, rather than when it hit a target. It was a technological development that might help turn the tide of the war against Germany and in the Pacific. Bitts said that the new computer-and-radar system was called the Signal Corps Radar 584, SCR-584 for short.

And, reflected Sam, it had all been foreshadowed by what he had learned from Hadntz’s papers after that night in December. But this stuff was way, way back in the beginning of the paper. If
this
was possible, then—

A thought struck him. “If they’d had this radio detection system at Pearl Harbor—”

“They did,” said Bitts.

“
What
?”

“Not this, but they had a long-wave radio imaging station that had just been set up and had not yet been tested for acceptance. It was only on at night. The operator had a trainee with him, and stayed over about ten minutes that morning. They saw blips on the screen and called it in. The plotters had just gone off-shift; the guy who answered the phone said that it must be regularly scheduled B-17’s coming in from the mainland. Nobody expected the Japanese to attack.”

Sam pushed back his chair. “Excuse me.” He brushed past the guard and found a bathroom down the hall.

Inside, he locked the door, leaned against the cold tile wall, and vomited.

As he splashed water on his face, the cold light of winter dawn washed through a high window. He put both hands on the sink, leaned forward, and bowed his head. Thousands of men had died. Hundreds were entombed in the ocean, like Keenan, or had been burned beyond recognition in the tremendous fires set off by the Japanese attack.

Just having technology wasn’t enough. It had to be used.

How many Keenans might be saved, if Hadntz’s ideas, whatever they might lead to, actually worked?

Did time have a shape, as Hadntz suggested? Was it as malleable as music, demanding certain basics but open to improvisation?

The idea opened new doors, turning him mercifully away from his previous obsessive thoughts.

Sam sat on the wooden chair beneath the window and watched the tiny octagonal tiles on the floor form various patterns, depending on—what? Something his brain was doing, suggesting different ways of seeing. Maybe time was a pattern which one chose to see, out of several possible patterns. Perhaps one’s genetic material—the DNA, which Hadntz claimed was malleable—determined the pattern one saw. Perhaps time was a series of tones—frequencies that humans interpreted and might eventually regulate with as much ease as electricity.

He sat there, thinking, ranging through possibilities as if they each had an azimuth and elevation, and he had a mechanism that could focus on them and enable or disable them according to…again, what? How could one measure the ripples from a stone tossed in a pond, interacting with an infinite number of other tossed-stone ripples?

He sat there till Wink came and fetched him.

O
KAY, NOW LET
’
S
make ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ modern. A-flat.” Wink counted out the time, and it was fast.

It was midnight. Sam and Wink were in a deserted lounge building at Aberdeen.

After as many visits to Minton’s and Monroe’s as possible, including Sunday afternoon jam sessions, they had discerned that the harmonic rules within modern music were dictated by tones themselves rather than an artificial framework—scales—most commonly used in Western music. Rhythm, the other main component, also followed no previous form, and the music swung of its own accord, off balance and falling toward resolutions adroitly avoided. They had chosen the most innocuous song they could think of, and it was now so modern, so abstract, that its roots could barely be discerned.

Sam played a sixteen-bar solo, passed it to Wink, and they finished in a stretch meant to be in unison but that fell to pieces. They finished, breathless and laughing.

“That was your fault,” said Sam, collapsing onto a worn couch.

Wink wiped sweat from his forehead. “Not so. You’ve been slacking off.”

Wink had had Sam practicing scales in different keys until it seemed as though his fingers would fall off. Some scales, given the arrangement of holes on the saxophone, seemed almost impossible to play quickly, but Sam rapidly improved.

Wink filled at least part of the void left by Keenan’s death. He was immediate, and radiated something akin to Keenan’s relish for living to the full.

Studying his notes for the frequent tests on the revolutionary new information they were absorbing required all of Sam’s mental energy, but he occasionally took out Hadntz’s paper and tried to understand it in the light of what he was learning. Security was tight in the shops in which they worked with the components of the M-9, but Sam used the experience to think about what might be usable, in his immediate environment, if the Army allowed him to continue on his present track, in creating a prototype.

It seemed impossible, here at Aberdeen. There was no privacy. The shops were locked when not in use, and placed under armed guard. The M-9 and radar were top-secret.

He would need his own shop, specialized tubes, and other materials which he would have to synthesize out of disparate components. Parts of the process were simply not included in the Hadntz paper. He would have to deduce those on his own.

But…what if he was successful? What was Hadntz’s real purpose in recruiting him? What if something unimaginably new
was
born, as she hoped? It would change…everything.

It’s just a form of technology, he told himself. An application of science, like the M-9. Science was neutral—merely information. Technologies were focused. Human intent determined their development and use.

But human intent was what she proposed to manipulate. If an atomic bomb was possible, and it was in the works in Germany, wasn’t it his responsibility to do something?

If the Hadntz Device worked, though…who had the moral authority even to use it?

She talked about averaging, about the device being available to everyone, even children. The genetic triggers of their time-sense would be different. The plasticity of mind that enabled learning would be replicated at will, rather than disappearing at an early age. She cited work in child development by an Italian doctor that proved these learning abilities occurred in discrete stages, and that if one stage was missed, the child would not have the same chance to learn as easily as, say, they learned their own language at an early age. Hadntz’s paper ranged over a huge number of subjects, searching for a uniting theory that could then be used…but how?

Playing bebop was so demanding that it diverted him from this obsessive conundrum, freed the part of his mind that needed that freedom in order to even begin to understand.

“Hard work,” commented Sam.

“Thinking is always hard work.”

“Kind of like inventing radar.”

“Yeah, but thinking about music is free. You need a lot of money to think about radar. Laboratories to test theories. Shops to create hardware.”

“Big companies to produce the stuff.”

“But it’s all just electronic pulses.”

“Like music.”

Wink nodded. “I seriously think that there is a connection. At least in the fact that human minds are involved in the production of highly disciplined pulses. What moves me in modern jazz is the same thing that moves me when I think about the M-9. Both are an astounding confluence of thought, attempts to make it new that suddenly come together and bear fruit. Sometimes it seems as if art and science are very closely related. Both make me feel like humans have been stumbling toward the light for centuries, and now the sun has risen. Like you have to keep finding out all kinds of things that don’t seem connected, and then someone will see how to unite them. There’s the art of it.” Wink tended to fall into such verbal reflection, and Sam found himself encouraging it; what Wink thought often reflected what he was thinking.

Sam wondered, not for the first time, whether he should share Hadntz’s paper with Wink. He was cleared, security-wise, so the Army had solved that question for Sam. But Sam was still unsure.

They got to New York almost every weekend. If they left directly after their class wrapped up, they could be in New York in time for a nice dinner and a fair amount of music.

Hadntz’s ideas about the quantum nature of consciousness sometimes came to the fore as Sam sat in Minton’s listening to the concrete, seemingly isolated packets of information that made up modern jazz, strung together in a whole that made more sense the more he listened to it. And the more he heard, the more he craved, because it led his mind in one direction, a timeless one, bright, in direct counterpoint to the darkness that was now Europe and the Pacific. No one knew how the war would end. All of Europe might fall to Hitler, all of Asia to the Japanese. One, the other, or both, seemed equally likely. The reported brutality of these regimes made such futures, so very possible, seem unlivable. It was a tense time, charged with the immediacy of history in the making, the sense that everyone had to work very quickly, as hard as they could.