Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  His sympathy worried me.

  And there’s Laura to think of now.

  But she was no more a civilian than I was. The war was bigger than me, or Laura, or any of us.

  “What’s wrong with this project?” I asked the Old Man then.

  “Nothing, per se. But the Nazis have their own program running. If they beat us to it, the world will be under Adolf’s jackboot before you know it. And we’re not going to let that happen.”

  “No, sir.”

  Those two defiant words were my commitment: to the mission, to the future, to the decisions that changed our lives forever.

  I had a pass that would let me through any Allied checkpoint, even if the name read H. Himmler and I was belting out the “Horst Wessel” song at full volume. That was the one I used now, accepting the sergeant-major’s salute.

  I waited while the megarhino-hide blast doors slid open, then descended hard chitin steps into the Tac Bunker.

  The observation balcony already held a visitor. I recognized Admiral Quinn; it was not mutual. Instead, he nodded cautiously: a typical senior officer’s greeting to a Whitehall man dressed in civvies.

  He slid a cigarette half out of his packet of Senior Service, and proffered it.

  “No thank you, sir.”

  “Fascinating.” He closed the packet without taking one himself, slid it inside his dark braid-decorated jacket. “Don’t you think?”

  “Always.”

  Beneath us, the cavern stretched for two shadow-shrouded miles, upheld by massive columns, spanned everywhere by darkly glistening fibers that formed the Black Web. At the lowest levels, Strategic Command personnel were tiny uniformed figures scurrying amid overwhelming complexity, clutching their clipboards like talismans. Some walked with blue-scarlet messenger-transparrots perched upon their shoulders, ready to fly upon command.

  But it was the Web itself that drew one’s gaze.

  Black hawsers as thick as Nelson’s Column, a plethora of others merely as wide as my forearm, down to millions of near-invisible threads: all dark as night, catenary curves hanging in a three-dimensional maze, beyond any single person’s comprehension.

  And along those threads crawled, in every conceivable direction, the one army that might halt Hitler’s destruction of Europe: dark micro-spiders, and their bigger, fist-size counterparts whose swollen thoraces would burst open to give birth to myriad offspring. Each tiny arachnid speck would already be imprinted with interaction behavior; combined in their millions, the combination formed the Black Web’s ghostly, disembodied gestalt: a paramind that knew nothing of fatigue or fear or morality, but whose analytical powers might someday grant us victory.

  “Excuse me, Admiral.”

  My footsteps sounded strangely hollow as I passed along the chitinous catwalk, descending to the North Atlantic display. A wide map table tracked the vital Liberty Leviathan convoys, the U.S. lifeline that—bless their hearts!—was all that kept the British Isles from starvation.

  But we had only patchy success in tracking the enemy’s U-shark hunter-killer squadrons, which preyed on merchant vessels from beneath the gray choppy waves, too often taking out the battleorca escorts that formed the backbone of His Majesty’s Royal Navy.

  And I thought of the Yanks’ great behemoth-class carriers, burning and squealing in their death throes, trapped helplessly in the docks of Pearl Harbor beneath the Japanese hydra attack, the ravening dragon-fire of Yamamoto’s carrier-launched squadrons. We weren’t the only ones to suffer in this war.

  Military considerations fled my mind as I saw that elegant figure bending across the table, biting her lip as she used a long pointer to push a tiny model convoy onto revised coordinates.

  Laura …

  Her name was a prayer, a sigh.

  When she looked up, a smile broke across her face, and she waved.

  The tiny tearoom was spick and span—no ring-shaped stains, no chipped cups—with whitewashed bricks. Close heat emanated from large steam pipes running beneath the ceiling, occasionally knocking as if someone were trying to get out. The kettle’s long flex ran across hooks above a poster reading THE ENEMY HAS SPIDERS EVERYWHERE. Overstuffed armchairs and a tattered settee lent it the look of Senior Common Room, from the days of schoolboy innocence.

  Before ’38 …

  Laura touched my arm. “Are you all right?”

  “Just a touch of malaria.” The usual excuse—but this was Laura. “Actually … A touch of memory. That’s a whole lot worse.”

  November: a chill, fresh breeze blowing along Friedrichstrasse—

  Even now, it haunted me.

  —with morning sun glinting on the crystal shards.

  “The Old Man’s sending you back out.”

  I looked at her. “Just what did you say your assignment is, darling?”

  “My current job involves technical background for someone who’s on a trip to the American Southwest.”

  “Does it, indeed?”

  I was destined to meet you, my love.

  “Oh, yes.” She handed me a cup, balanced on its ugly flower-decorated saucer. “Have you heard of Albert Einstein?”

  “Well, yes. He’s famous for—”

  “The Project is his idea.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “He persuaded Roosevelt. Signed an open letter, with several of his colleagues from Princeton and elsewhere. The Brooklyn Project grew directly from that letter.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Einstein’s a true genius. Special multiplicity theory is what everyone knows him for—”

  “DNA structure,” I said. “Replicator-based evolution. Gene migration.”

  Laura, sitting with her knees primly together and her tea balanced atop, nodded as though everyone knew that. Above us, the steam pipes clanged.

  “The point is—” She glanced up, waited for the noise to subside. “—the special theory was inevitable. Yet general multiplicity theory is a stroke of genius, ahead of its time.”

  “If he hadn’t been born … Or if he hadn’t been Jewish, he might’ve been a Nazi.”

  “Don’t say things like that.” Laura shivered.

  The tea in my mug had grown cold, and I set it down on the parquet floor. “Sorry.”

  She laid her hand on mine. “It was luck that you and I met now. We weren’t supposed to …”

  My world would have remained bleak and Laura-less, forever empty.

  “Perhaps SOE didn’t plan it, but Providence did.”

  Outside, footsteps sounded. We waited, but they walked on past the doorway.

  Laura touched my cheek.

  I leaned forward, and we kissed.

  One week later, I was standing at the edge of a pink-orange desert, beneath a cloudless azure sky, a white-hot blazing sun. The air’s furnace heat pressed upon me, squeezed me in its invisible fist.

  A dark road arrowed across sands, disappeared over a low ridge. Behind me, straight railway lines—rail road, I should remember where I was—gleamed silver through the rippling air. The diminishing train slid through heat-haze, its chugging oddly flat in this dryness. I watched it disappear.

  And then I was alone in a sere, endless landscape where human beings were never meant to live.

  At my feet stood a battered suitcase that had been with me in the Far East and occupied Europe, though it bore no labels to mark its travels. My woolen suit, perfect for an English spring, was heavy upon me; folded atop my suitcase, the big overcoat looked ridiculous.

  As was this rendezvous: away from the town, and the eyes of hypothetical fifth columnists. I could hardly be more conspicuous … should there be anyone here to observe me, before heat and dehydration took me.

  I loosened my tie.

  Off to one side, purple mountains shaded the horizon. Would there be snow upon their peaks? The thought of frozen water melting in cupped hands was almost overwhelming. Much closer, hundreds of saguaro cacti stood with upraised arms, as though caught in a holdup: like gree
n capital psis.

  Braithwaite’s ruler snapped me across the knuckles as I stumbled conjugating my Greek verbs—

  Those damned school days. They haunt you forever.

  Stop whingeing.

  In Africa, thousands of men were facing worse conditions than these. At least here, there was no threat of Rommel’s rextanks suddenly appearing over the horizon, bringing their heavy armament to—

  There.

  A small dust cloud puffed upon the distant blacktop.

  Deliberately unarmed, I waited in the heat. If they were an enemy of some kind, they would not know my face; at close quarters, the absence of a weapon might convince them I was harmless. And I always had my hands.

  Half-fist to the gendarme’s larynx. He falls, croaking, clutching his throat, eyes popping as he chokes… .

  A bad memory. But it had been a necessary killing, and I got away before the Waffen SS officers arrived: the ones I was sure—almost sure, that’s what tortured me—the gendarme had notified. In the darkened alleyway, with the rain falling down in sheets—

  Concentrate.

  Here. Now.

  Olive-colored, the jeepo was much closer now, revealing the driver: white shirt, broad scarlet tie blowing in the slipstream. I swallowed, wishing I could be that cool.

  And then it was skidding to a halt, the jeepoceros bracing its squat, powerful legs, throwing up a cloud of dusty orange sand. Sunlight glinted—watch out—but it was not a weapon: the driver bore a polished steel hook in lieu of a left hand.

  “Climb in, pal.”

  I controlled my breathing, ready for action. “It gets cold,” I said casually, “in December.”

  “Yeah, right. Willya get in?”

  I waited.

  “All right … Drops to seven below.” Hawklike features frowned. “Or is that nine? Like I should know Latin, too.”

  Parole-and-countersign were a random numerical reference, indirect if possible—I granted that December might be ambiguous—and a reply code which subtracted three. Where I came from, we took such things seriously.

  Throwing my case and coat into the back, I slipped into the passenger seat (on the right) and held out my hand. “How do you do.”

  “Hi. The name’s Felix. Felix Leichtner, though I’m thinking of changing the name. My old man will be pissed.”

  “I would think so. I’m—”

  “I know who you are. Hang on.”

  He threw the switch, and the jeepo rumbled into life; then he swung it through an impossible turn—I glimpsed a small tan form watching us: ground squirrel—and floored the accelerator. Dashboard membranes flared red as we tore off along the lonely road, slipstream blowing, dust cloud billowing in our wake, while in every direction the orange sands stretched hot and majestic: a wilderness that could kill as surely as a hail of Wehrmacht bullets.

  Vastness.

  Overhead, a lone eagle wheeled in the deep azure sky. If the jeepo failed, would vultures make their own ghastly appearance? On every side, sandstone glowed; farther back, rocky outcrops bared strata: mint-green and sugary white, stippled with black.

  Would Laura care to live here after the war, with me? Picture it: an adobe house near a small desert town, where I could paint New Mexico landscapes for a living, and share this beauty with a woman beyond compare.

  In the midst of vastness, an outpost.

  We shot under the candy-striped barrier before it fully lifted—Felix taking time to give a shoddy half-salute to the sentries, his hook-hand steering—and onto Main Street: the largest straight dusty track between wooden rows of whitewashed houses. Their plain exteriors held the charm of military barracks everywhere.

  But soldiers in camp did not have individual homes, with slender wives in light cotton dresses—

  “Eyes on the road, Limey.”

  “You’re driving.”

  “But that’s Mrs. Teller, and you don’t want to start off on the wrong foot, my friend.”

  I shook my head. “I’m spoken for.”

  “Not what I heard.” Felix glanced in my direction, then nodded as he span the jeepo to a screeching halt. “Good for you, though. And this”—with a blinding glint from his gesturing hook—“is home, sweet home.”

  Two badly upholstered armchairs sat in the too-hot lounge. We dragged them to face each other—I had unpacked bug spray and used it: no eavesdrop-mites would survive the aerosol—so that Felix could brief me.

  “First off, the Oppenheimers are throwing one of their parties tonight. You’ll like Oppy. The Martians will be there—”

  “I’m sorry?” This briefing had suddenly veered onto an unexpected track.

  “Pet name. A bunch of Hungarian scientists: Wigner, Szilard, Teller, von Kármán. They’re hoping to get Johnny von Neumann on board, from Princeton.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Fun guy, sort of. Wife called Klara, a bit shrewish. He’s something like your Turing, in his research interests. I think they met briefly.”

  I shrugged, but—inside—my nerves strung themselves tighter. Plying me for info?

  “Come on, pal.” Felix sighed. “Turing’s geneticists at Bletchley Park are your major contribution to the war effort, and you’ve got the right level of clearance to know it. Without him, the Nazi commspiders’ genomes and ganglionics would still be a mystery.”

  I relaxed, a little. “It was your clearance I was worried about, old fruit.”

  Felix gave me a strange look.

  “That’s not an insult, is it?”

  “God, no. Look, can we go somewhere to get a coffee?”

  “Sure.” And, as we stood, “I thought you Limeys only drank tea, old chap. Sorry … old fruit.”

  I shook my head, but in fact I wished that Felix was not going to leave me here, among the boffins and their wives. I would rather spend my days swapping Yank-and-Limey humor than bashing my head against cutting-edge military research.

  Laura … It’s your company I need.

  But if we survived this ongoing nightmare, formed the future we both wanted, it would be worth the wait.

  Secrets within secrets.

  Even in the long mess hall, we talked only of innocuous matters, not trusting the background chattering and clattering to hide our words. Felix noticed my interest when a platoon ran past outside, to cadence.

  They were lean and fit to a man, and I needed to keep my own physical levels high. A tan would be suspect, once they dropped me into Europe; but melanin-reversers could wind back exposure effects from the desert sun.

  After we returned to my temporary home, Felix briefed me on base security. “The core,” he said, sitting down, “is a team of what are supposed to be Airborne Rangers.”

  “But—?”

  “They’re some of Donovan’s finest, and they keep closer track of both people and research than the intellectuals expect.”

  “I may not be intelligent”—I was quoting the Royal Navy gunners—“but I can lift heavy weights.”

  “Like that, yes. Easily underestimated.”

  So operatives from OSS were here. Very interesting.

  “Can I train with them? I need to keep fit.”

  Dawn runs around Hyde Park, evening Indian club practice: they kept me going in London. But I needed more, and the Rutland training school was half a world away.

  “If they can find you a uniform … They get up real early, you know?”

  “Good. I’ll be busy working my brain the rest of the time.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. Dick Feynman’s a magician, literally and intellectually. He’ll mentor you for an hour or two a day, but you’ll be studying like crazy on your own.”

  “Good … What’s he like?”

  “Who, Dick? Quite the prankster. Cracked open the base commander’s safe, left a birthday card, with a French letter tucked inside.”

  I rubbed my forehead with the heel of my palm. Travel-lag, after the long crossing in the deHavilland pteradrone, and the long train jou
rney.

  “This is supposed to be serious.”

  “Feynman’s wife is in a sanatorium, near the town. Dying, apparently. The comedian act is partly a front.”

  I blinked and turned away. Laura … I miss you.

  “Resistance-engineered bacterium. He hates the Nazis more than anyone I’ve met.”

  “All right.” But was he there for Kristallnacht?

  I said nothing, but my guard was down and Felix sensed the vibrations.

  “Though you might give Dick”—his hawk-smile was humorless—“a run for his money.”

  “Chattanooga Choo Choo” was blaring from the radiogram as we insinuated ourselves into the party. From their files—I’d been granted access; Felix stood over me in the base commander’s office as I read—I recognized faces: Oppenheimer, Fuchs, Teller.

  Off to one side, lean and quick-witted, Feynman was dazzling a group of his colleagues’ wives with a conjuring trick. His sparkling eyes, more than sleight of hand, captivated them.

  “Not a security risk, then?” I murmured.

  “Probably not.” Felix was looking at the buffet.

  I knew what he meant. There was no reason for a fifth columnist to make himself conspicuous in quite that way: no reason to perpetrate double-bluff. But schizotypal behavior was common among academics… .

  Natural paranoia: discount.

  A pretty woman offered us drinks. Her brilliant smile, directed at Felix’s lean face, became fixed as he tapped the glass with his steel hook.

  “Nice crystalware.”

  “Um, thanks …” And then she was gone.

  I looked at Felix. “That was a little coldhearted.”

  “Gets things out in the open.” He gave the tiniest of shrugs. “It doesn’t worry everyone.”

  “What do you tell them?”

  “Just a wound I picked up in—Oh. Massive allergies, is all.”

  I nodded. OSS personnel were so thoroughly infused with antivirals that their bodies threw off clone-factor treatment.

  “Why, Fred—” There was another smiling woman in our path, looking impossible to faze. She used Felix’s cover name with irony, as though aware it was not his real identity.

  “How’re you doing?” said Felix.

  “Why don’t you introduce me to your friend?”