by Lou Anders
Courtliness, not flirting.
“The name’s Brand.” I used my own cover ID. “James Br—”
“And he’s a Limey,” interjected Felix. “But he can’t help it.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful.”
“Jamie, this is Mrs. Oppenheimer.”
She held out her hand to shake.
For a while we exchanged pleasantries as she pointed out people of interest—“That’s my husband, known as Oppy to these young people”—and made rueful observations about the poor facilities in their makeshift town.
“But we’re coping,” she said. “And it’s important work, we know.”
Then someone caught her attention, and she bade us a polite farewell and moved on. Felix and I remained standing, while a few of the more energetic men danced with their wives to Glenn Miller. At home, they’d have been singing by now, about hanging out their washing on the Siegfried Line.
It was too hot to party. I was relieved when Felix took my elbow and steered me toward the screen door, passing close to Feynman and his admirers.
“—be kidding, Dick,” one of the pretty women was saying. “That’s disgusting.”
“Nothing personal, ladies.” Feynman grinned. “Everybody’s body weight is ten percent bacteria. Not just yours. They’re wriggling about, swapping genetic material like crazy—”
Shocked intakes of breath. Giggles.
“You look at the world, Dick”—the woman who spoke was pale-complexioned; she briefly touched Feynman’s knee—“like nobody else.”
(Was I the only one who saw the shadow pass behind his eyes, the thought of his dying wife?)
“But there’s beauty in that dance of life, don’t you see? You can understand the way things are built, and still enjoy the way they look esthetically.”
“Uh-uh. You’re just different from the rest of us.”
“I’ll say.” One of the other women smiled.
Everybody laughed.
“Except that”—Feynman was excited now—“we can’t be all that different from each other, or you couldn’t build a human being by taking chemical fragments of two people—unrelated people, unless there’s anyone here from Kentucky?—and fusing them together. That’s exactly how babies are made.”
“But Dick, I thought—”
And then we were past them, through the door, into the desert night.
Overhead, black velvet and a blazing multitude of silver stars such as one could never see in England. From behind us, a burst of laughter.
“Makes you realize,” murmured Felix, “how insignificant we are. Maybe humanity deserves to go under.”
I glanced back into the warm light, the partying scientists. “And is our salvation really in there?”
“Getting drunk and flirting? Why not?”
We stepped into the middle of the pale moonlit dusty track that passed for a road.
“Y’know what?” Felix added. “A couple of them have calculated that, if the nucleic bomb goes off, the reaction could cascade through the biosphere. Wipe out all life in hours. And I mean all life.”
I stopped. “You’re jok—No. Is Feynman one of them? One of the doubters?”
“Oh, no. He thinks it’s bound to work.”
Looking up, I wondered how those distant, eternal suns burning in endless darkness might regard ephemeral mortals, who so easily contemplated their own destruction. And did they know how to laugh, those stars, or cry with pity?
Or would they even care?
Equations were scrawled across the dusty blackboard, alongside simplifying diagrams invented by Feynman purely to teach me things only the world’s leading researchers comprehended. Einsteinian emergence-matrices measured base-base and gene-gene interdependence; Hamiltonians tracked evolutionary expansion through morphological phase-space… .
And a pounding migraine, beginning over my right eye, spread inexorably inward.
“—and then you depolarize the biflange confabulator, and the re-keezy blart destimblefies.”
I wrote down half of that on my spiral-bound notebook, then stopped. “Er, what—?”
“I had a feeling”—Feynman was grinning—“I might have lost you there.”
I laid down my fountain pen, rubbed my forehead. “There’s a faint possibility,” I told him, “that you might be correct.”
“You’re not alone. Einstein hates quantum evolution. With a vengeance.”
“At least he understands it.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” Feynman perched himself on the nearest desk—the room was set up for twenty people, but he had requisitioned it for us two—then threw his chalk up in the air, caught it. “Nobody understands the theory. We just know how to use it.”
I stared at him.
Feynman’s intellect was magical. Whatever he explained became obvious, transformed me into a genius, torrents of energy coursing through my mind. Only later, alone in my room working through cell-function pathways, would I grind up against my own limitations.
“If you told me why you need to know this stuff”—gently—“we could focus on what’s necessary.”
And blow mission security?
But Feynman was correct. I could not manage this without rigorous and specific coaching.
I let out a slow breath.
“What I need”—I glanced out the window at sapphire sky—“is to recognize schematics for a nucleic bomb at a glance. Well enough to tell a fake from the real thing, or something that’s almost a hundred percent correct.”
The impish humor stopped dancing in his eyes. “You need to do this quickly?”
“Precisely.”
“Under pressure, you mean.”
“An awful lot, “I told him.
He mouthed the word awful.
“Well, then.” Feynman jumped up from the desk, strode into a patch of sunlight, and began vigorously to wipe every equation from the board. “Let’s get to work.”
“You understand—”
“I’ve worked out where you’ll be doing this, my friend.” Feynman raised an eyebrow. “You’re in the SOE, a real live spook, and you’ll be examining enemy plans in situ. Is that how you say it in the King’s English?”
“Close enough.”
Feynman grinned, but I recognized the shadow that lurked behind his eyes.
“Well, then …” In an Eton-by-way-of-the-Bronx accent, “The best of British luck, old chap.”
The Quonset hut’s interior was dark and sweltering. Exertion threw off heat and humidity as we worked the drills. Palm-heels, elbow-strikes—blinking away salt-stinging sweat—side-kicks to knees.
“Harder!” barked Gunny Rogers.
Panting, my opponent tried for my wrist, but our bodies were slick with sweat—olive-green undershirts sopping wet, dark—and his hand slipped so I thrust up under his chin, swept his legs away.
“Come on, ladies. Let’s work.”
We pushed harder and harder, until we were barely standing, unable to see straight, and Gunny finally called a halt. “Just take five,” he said as we breathed hard through open mouths.
In the corner, one of the Rangers was being discreetly sick.
Then I saw Gunny Rogers frown, looking over my shoulder. I turned around.
A big shaven-headed Ranger was throwing a punch—“Catch it!”—expecting his smaller partner to lock the wrist. Except that he came in too fast and hard, the short man failing to grab—
“Damn it,” muttered Gunny.
—and the big man swung a long, deceptive uppercut, buried his fist. His victim dropped in a fetal position, gasping.
Gunny stepped forward, but I was closer.
“Actually, old chap,” I drawled, “I believe you’re misinterpreting.” I was still moving as I spoke.
“What do you—?”
Then I whipped both my hands against his big ham-fist and snapped him to the ground. His knees struck hard, pain brightening in his small eyes.
“Captain Fairbairn,” I told him, “considers it
an attack.”
And I knew how devastating the wrist-throw could be.
I turned away, trying not to look at Gunny Rogers, who was struggling to hide his broad grin. The man who had been my partner raised his eyebrows and whistled in appreciation.
“You’ve actually trained with—?”
He stopped, even as I felt the rush of air—behind—and I dropped, spinning—
But a big shadow moved past me, Gunny Rogers, and his huge arm shot out and the big man was down. Then Gunny was in the air, boots coming down together in a deadly bronco kick—
“No, Gunny!”
—but he separated his feet at the last moment, boot heels thudding into the mat either side of the downed man’s head, raising puffs of dust instead of smashed bones, smeared blood.
“That”—Gunny grinned—“is what you might call the Applegate variation.”
When the short, slim Captain Fairbairn demonstrated his combat skills before seated representatives of the U.S. Forces, he tossed a huge bear of a man called Rex Applegate straight into the laps of some very senior officers.
Applegate, at least, had been impressed. He now led the U.S. program teaching deadly combat skills—Japanese and Chinese warrior-techniques, by way of the Shanghai police—to elite forces and covert units.
And, so I had heard, to stay-at-home G-men. The FBI were worried about civilians—demobbed military men, once the war was over—possessing finely honed fighting techniques they did not know themselves; hence their own training. In Britain, we had too much on our rationed plates to worry about peacetime security.
“Not bad, Mr. Brand.” Gunny Rogers clapped me on the shoulder afterwards, as we filed out of the Quonset glowing with exertion, strained and exhausted.
“Not bad yourself, Gunny.”
Laughter and coarse jokes—some at the expense of the big man who now grinned ruefully: he had learned a lesson—rose up from the others as they headed to the showers. I slipped away, heading toward my small home.
Overhead, the empty early-morning sky gleamed, azure and serene.
Are we primitive animals, spilling each others’ blood?
But I wondered, passing along the deserted dusty street, quiet before the working day, whether there were any rational conclusions to be drawn in a world where cosseted intellectuals, civilization’s best, with their blackboards and chalk and scribble-filled notepads, could devise modes of devastation far deadlier than teeth ripping artery, blade slicing intestine in the thunder and stink and dirt of battle, and work their own cataclysm of torn DNA and ecodestruction, remotely tearing life asunder while holding themselves aloof from the stink and rawness and fear, at distant remove from the messy, bloody, excremental business of death.
Felix returned two days before my departure, purely to bid me farewell. We stood at the edge of the makeshift town that promised to change so much, and stared out at the dawn-smeared sky, the vast wide New Mexico desert, not needing to speak.
Finally, it was time for Felix to leave. A low-slung Ford, its black-green carapace filmed with desert dust, was waiting for him, a crop-haired driver at the wheel.
“Traveling in luxury,” I said.
“Back to Washington, to fly a desk.” Felix raised his left arm, watched liquid sunlight slide along the polished hook. “Just what I always wanted, I don’t think.”
“You’ll do all right.”
“Sure. I’ll be training the neos.” With a sudden grin, “They’ll be impressed with this against their throats.”
“They’ll get the point.”
“They surely will.”
“Well—”
We shook hands.
“You watch your ass over there, Limey.”
“Look after yourself, Yank.”
He climbed into the back of his vehicle, and nodded as it slipped past me. I watched as it followed the arrow-straight road, black through Martian red, until the Ford grew tiny with distance, was lost from sight.
My final night. Restless, I walked the silvery, moonlit length of Main Street, wheeled left, passed the commander’s cabin, Oppenheimer’s—
Light.
Reflexively, I crouched. Torchlight flicked across the darkened window from inside, was gone.
A burglar? In Oppy’s office?
Raising a hue and cry went against my nature and my training. An alert intruder might slip away. So I moved softly, heel-to-toe, creeping close to the wall until I reached the door.
The knob turned without a sound. Slowly, I passed inside, and closed the door against the night.
Farther inside, the hallway was dark. I crept forward, reached a corner, peered around.
Not Oppy’s room.
The burglar had passed on. Light flickered from a cross-corridor. Shadows and darkness were eerily confusing, but surely that was just an ordinary seminar room—
“Oh, very nice.” The intruder’s voice floated toward me: soft but unmistakable.
What the hell? Feynman?
I shrugged my shoulders once, flexed and released my hands, then crept forward, ready to strike.
But when I stopped at the doorway and peered inside, Dick Feynman was cross-legged upon a desktop, diabolically impish as he played his torch’s beam across a blackboard that held nothing that was secret from him.
In fact, I realized suddenly, he was due to attend the lecture that Teller was giving here tomorrow, and it was Teller’s own equations that were scribbled across the board in preparation.
I cleared my throat.
“Doing some technical prep of your own, Mr. Feynman?”
He jumped, then slowly smiled, and pointed to an equation. “I can solve this tonight,” he said, “in about three hours. I know it took Ed and his pals the best part of a year. But if I do it in ten seconds, during the lecture tomorrow—”
I laughed silently and shook my head. “You don’t need to impress anyone.”
“I know. It’s part of the fun.”
After a moment, he slipped down from the desktop, tapped me on the upper arm. “Come on.”
Then he led the way into the darkened corridor, as though there were nothing out of the ordinary in being caught sneaking around at night in a classified military installation. Perhaps, for Dick Feynman, it was the merest side note in an eventful life.
I had been right about an intruder in Oppenheimer’s office. Feynman bent down at the lock, fiddled with it for a moment, then let the door swing open.
“That was locked, wasn’t it, Dick?”
“Not well enough.”
“Thank God you’re on our side.”
I had been in Oppy’s office before, but not in the side room, which Feynman opened. Shelves bore glass display cases—strange shadows shifting in the light of Feynman’s torch—and a small lab bench stood at the far end.
“Samples.” Feynman pointed. “Don’t open anything. We don’t have isolation suits.”
“Whatever you—”
I stopped, swallowing, and the darkness seemed to sway about me. My body shuddered, as though some outside agency controlled my nerves. I could do nothing but wait out the shaking fit. Soon enough, it subsided.
Hand of glass.
That was what it looked like: glassine, perfectly sculpted, down to translucent bones and sinews and veins within. In other cases, different anatomical parts were likewise near-transparent, some shaded purple as though carved from quartz.
“Preservative stains,” said Feynman. “I sometimes take a peek, just to remind myself how horrible our work is. And why we’re doing it.”
I shook my head, as though to deny the memories made tangible before me. Sweat coated my skin like a new, protective layer; I thought I might throw up. Neither the morphine treatment nor the long sessions with SOE padres had laid those ghosts to rest.
Nor could they ever.
“What’s wrong, my friend? You know the kind of work we do.”
I was an intelligence agent, trained to remain calm before interrogation, to pass
unnoticed through foreign lands beneath the eyes of the enemy. But this …
Shards, glinting upon the cobblestones—
This, I would never forget.
“I was there,” I whispered, ignoring the tears that tracked down my cheeks. “In Germany, on Kristallnacht.”
“Dear God.”
I looked Feynman in the eyes.
“God,” I told him, “was nowhere to be seen that night.”
Memories, made indelible.
It was chilly, that ninth day of November in 1938. I was in Ravensbrück, but the exact location was irrelevant: for on that night, every city, town, and village in Germany became aware of the diabolic movement that controlled the country, of the tiny, scarcely significant number of individuals who were clear-sighted and decent and courageous enough to speak out against it.
The squads wore heavy coats over their brown shirts, but only at first. As the night progressed, they grew warm with their work: dragging Jews from their homes, setting light to their businesses, bringing violence to the streets of Mozart’s civilization, to Schopenhauer’s culture, and whatever flared up in bedrooms would remain forever spoken only by women’s remembered shrieks, by the sobbing of violated children.
Sturmabteilung thugs were everywhere, beating their victims in plain sight of any citizen who cared to draw back his heavy curtains or step outside, while the SA’s infection squads screeched up in rented cars and trucks. Those who sprayed the victims were covered in protective gauntlets and hoods, as though unconvinced of their own purity, for the viral complexes were guaranteed harmless to the true Aryan genome.
Helpless, I watched.
Spray-victims scarcely screamed, for their vocal cords were one of the first parts to crystallize, as their panicked lungs sucked virus-laden mist inside and doomed them. When the entertainment lessened, as struggling flesh became static glass and canisters ran out of fluid, the looting and burning started. Eventually, flushed with riotous violence and armed with pickaxe handles, with wood torn from destroyed store fittings, they returned to the corpses, now frozen like glass statues in the street, and put their backs into new work, swinging downward, yelling curses, as they demonstrated their solution to the Jewish Question, the Judenfrage.
The next day, as the first groups of prisoners were forced aboard trucks to Dachau, I walked the streets, watching and listening, drinking in every detail of the fearful looks, the shared desperate supportive glee, even as my flesh crawled and every nerve screamed to get away, to forget that Crystal Night had ever happened.
