Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  As Schrödinger and Bohr had shown, enzymes act as chemical observers, forcing the collapse of molecular wave-functions—overlaid simultaneous possibilities—into one outcome. But an enzyme that repeatedly “observes” a molecule in the same position prevents it from once more entering a fuzzy, overlaid state, essentially freezing its configuration and energy forever.

  But quantum biology had another, counterintuitive tenet: that the way in which a measurement is carried out partly determines the value which results.

  And the New Mexico scientists made use of this. If the observing enzyme itself was slowly changing, then it forced the observed molecule to evolve in ways determined by the enzyme’s own biochemical propensities.

  “So what,” asked Wilhelm Two, turning from the blackboard, “do you think, my friend?”

  I tried to keep my face a frozen mask, but the Wilhelms exchanged a glance, and I knew that I had betrayed too much.

  Whatever the results they had obtained so far, I knew now that the Nazi nucleic bomb project was a viable program, and that if they continued long enough, they would succeed in destroying any ecosystem they targeted, including human life.

  “Also gut.” Wilhelm Two nodded. “Good enough. Let me show you—”

  A distant door clanged, and both Wilhelm’s faces grew pale simultaneously.

  They were not acting.

  “Patrol,” said Wilhelm One.

  Obviously unscheduled.

  “Quick.” Wilhelm Two pointed up at the isolation lab. “Get inside.”

  Piotr reached inside his jacket.

  No—

  He must have hidden a revolver there, despite my orders. The idea was, no firearms to be brought inside the installation itself. If we had to shoot, we were dead, our mission a failure.

  “Okay.” Piotr looked at me, then took his hand out of his jacket, empty. “I agree.”

  Laura went first up the pinewood steps.

  “Hurry.”

  Inside the isolation lab, Wilhelm Two pointed at two boothlike reaction cupboards built into the rear wall. He quickly pointed from Piotr to me.

  “You two will, um, Ihn verbergen …”

  “Hide,” said Wilhelm One, staring through the window to the wider lab below.

  Laura stared at me.

  “No,” I said.

  But then, “You must.” She reached up, brushed her fingertips across my lips. “There’s room for you two, and I’m on the staff roster—”

  “Quickly.” Piotr grabbed my sleeve. “We must.”

  “All right.”

  Twisting a Bakelite control-knob, Wilhelm nodded toward the transparent-fronted cupboards. The outer membrane slowly darkened to black opacity.

  “Squid-ink derivative.”

  “I—”

  But the doors outside were opening for the patrol, and there was no time to chat as I pushed myself inside, onto the waist-high surface, and pulled myself into a hunched position as the membrane hardened, trapping me inside the reaction cupboard.

  Laura—

  But I could see out into the isolation lab, with Laura shivering as the patrol burst into the shadowed area outside, as the two Wilhelms briefly conferred. Sounds were muted, the words indecipherable, but the ink-soaked membrane was transparent from my side.

  I let out a sound that was half a sob, then held myself still, breathing fast.

  The isolation door opened, and an SS officer stepped inside, his black uniform magnificent with silver badges and decorations. His round face looked almost pleasant, save for the thin purple scar and the lifeless gaze that passed over the cupboard membrane—I shivered, unable to stifle the reaction—and continued on to Laura and the two Wilhelms.

  “—Sie hier?” His voice raised high enough to penetrate my hiding place.

  Wilhelm Two muttered something, of which I could decipher only the word arbeiten. Claiming that they were working late on something important.

  Did the SS distrust their own chief scientists this much?

  Behind the officer, two gray-uniformed troopers took up position inside the doorway, hands upon their Mausers. But it was the SS man, with the fat white baton inserted in his shining belt, who scared me witless.

  Laura, my love.

  For a microsecond, her eyes flickered in my direction. Then she turned away and looked down at the floor as she answered a direct question from the officer.

  NO…

  I saw then that she was holding the glass dish from the lab bench where Wilhelm One had been standing; the scar bunched on his face as the SS man, too, noticed it. Off to one side, a small red light was blinking, and I wondered if Laura’s taking the sample dish had triggered some kind of silent alarm.

  The officer barked a question, but did not wait for Wilhelm One—already, to his credit, stepping forward—to answer.

  Instead, the baton slid from the black leather belt, its tapered nozzle just inches from Laura’s fine face—

  No! Laura!

  And I clawed the membrane and might have yelled, but it was already too late as the sporemist squirted and the woman I loved was a zombie before my fingers struck the membrane.

  I stopped, frozen, unable to comprehend what I had just seen.

  One of the troopers opened his mouth, about to speak—he might have heard me—but then he caught sight of the SS officer’s creamy smile and subsided. He exchanged a glance with his comrade: I could see their unspoken decision to remain quietly inconspicuous.

  Laura. Oh, my Laura.

  Too late, now.

  Expostulations, explanations. I could not care whether the Wilhelms cracked and gave me and Piotr away, or if they all walked away and left me here to suffocate and die. For Laura, the standing corpse of the woman I loved, was there before me: separated from my desperate grasp by a quarter-inch of impenetrable membrane and a lifetime of devastating regret.

  When the membrane finally dissolved and hands helped me out, I could scarcely process the information that Wilhelms One and Two were here, that Piotr’s hands were fastened on me like iron claws, and that the SS officer and his patrol were gone.

  “Laura … ,” I said, to the one person who could not hear.

  Who would never think a human thought again.

  I reached out to touch her cheek, but held back from touching, in case of infection: a moment’s cowardice that will never leave me. But there were tiny pustules already sprouting across that once-flawless ivory smoothness, precursors to the gross transformations that would soon render her fit company for the tormented monstrosities incarcerated in the pits outside.

  And was that a glimmer of tortured awareness in those fine, dead eyes?

  I hoped not. I prayed that she was truly gone.

  Oh, my Laura.

  Wilhelm One cleared his throat then, and said, “I am very sorry, sir.”

  Looking up, I saw him swallow, the same awareness registering in Wilhelm Two’s face: the killing rage, the cacaphonic roar inside, inciting blood-vengeance in a wave of eye-gouges and throat-strikes. I could destroy them, tear them limb from—

  “My friend.” Piotr drew his revolver. “If you tell me, I will shoot them now.”

  The gunshot would be suicide, but I could not care. And the two Wilhelms, swallowing, dared not speak.

  But finally I tore my gaze away from the one who mattered, and said, “What do you want? Really want?”

  “You approve the bomb plans?” asked Wilhelm Two. “They are acceptable?”

  “I—”

  And that was the moment when the mission—and the world—could have come crashing down. Because there was another blackboard in here, another chalk diagram annotated with Wilhelm Two’s scrawl, and its similarity to something Dick Feynman had shown me brought me to a halt.

  “I’m working on something,” he had said, “called Quantum Evolutionary Determinism. It’s years from completion, but there’s a technique you might use—”

  And so I used it now, in my head: Dick’s integration-over-all
-futures technique, as I stared at details of the enzyme whose job was to force-evolve the replicating core, and I knew now it would never work.

  Before, I had given away my thoughts. But with emotions burned away by Laura’s zombie-death, I had no reactions to betray me. It saved me, now that life was no longer worth anything at all.

  “—think they’re fine. Whitehall would love to have you.”

  “But I would need to continue my work.”

  “You’ll have a house in Oxford,” I told him. “A big one. And you’ll work with the finest minds we have.”

  A lie. Our scientists were not based in Oxford: too obvious a target.

  “Very well, then,” said Wilhelm Two.

  A decision crystallized in Wilhelm One’s eyes, and he nodded abruptly to his namesake.

  “Good luck, my friend.”

  Then he wheeled on one heel and walked quickly from the isolation lab. His footsteps clattered back from the pine steps, clacked across the polished parquet flooring, and then he was through the side door beneath the scarlet banner, and lost from sight.

  “I guess, my friend,” I said to Wilhelm Two, “you’ll be coming with us.”

  But there was one last development. Piotr, with a bottle of reagent in his hand, which might have been hydrogen peroxide, pulled a labcoat from its hook behind the door. He put down the stoppered bottle and hauled on the white coat.

  “You two get out of here.”

  “I—”

  “The patrol might come back. If they don’t look closely, they’ll think”—with a gesture toward Wilhelm Two—“that I’m him.”

  I answered Piotr, though I could look only at Laura as I spoke. “All right,” I said. “We’re going.”

  And, leaning closer, “Goodbye, my sweet darling.”

  Then I walked away without looking back, leaving Wilhelm to follow me if he chose.

  When we reached the far end of the steel passageway, Karol and Zenon were there, still leaning on the deadman-handle door controls, looking at us curiously.

  “Where—?”

  Then a shot banged out, loud and flat, from the labs behind us.

  Laura!

  And I knew that Piotr had granted her rest in the only way possible.

  “Come on.” I took hold of Wilhelm’s sleeve. “We’re moving fast now.”

  For his own sake, he obeyed the implicit command, not knowing that I saw through the sham, would not reveal my knowledge of the program’s uselessness.

  Because if I did, I jeopardized everything: the fate of Britain, of the western world. Betrayed the cause that Laura had died for.

  Oh, my love.

  Saved the world for which I no longer gave a damn.

  There were rushing patrols inside the grand house proper, heavy boots thudding on the carpeted hallways as they rushed to grab their weapons. But they allowed the senior scientist through, away from any danger that might have broken out inside the labs.

  We were too far away to hear more gunfire, but I knew that Piotr would not sell his life cheaply.

  Then out along the narrow defile, whose far end was marked by four bloody corpses—an entire patrol, dead—and our comrade Stanislaw, mortally wounded, white-faced and whimpering, inside his sentry box.

  Karol stepped inside with him, murmured comforting words, then used a Wehrmacht dagger to grant the only absolution possible.

  I was too numb to feel anything as we trekked across open ground to the forest, to begin our long journey to the rendezvous point and freedom.

  There must have been a flight, an RAF pickup; but posttraumatic amnesia set in, they told me afterwards, for the reminder of the journey home remains forever lost in vacuum.

  Little of the debriefing, in an isolated Wiltshire farmhouse, comes back to me, either. But I recall the conversation I finally had with the Old Man, when I returned to duty in Whitehall.

  “Sit down.” He pointed with his pipe stem to the hard wooden chair before his desk. “And I’m sorry about Laura.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  On the desk in front of him were typed papers, with diagrams annotated with ink in a tight, spiderly crawl I could not fail to recognize.

  “Might as well burn them.” I pointed at the schematics. “They’re worthless.”

  His gray eyes appraised me. “Obviously, you did not reveal that at the time. Why did you bring him back?”

  I closed my eyes.

  Laura …

  In my dreams, she always looked back at me.

  “Perhaps it’s too soon for you to—”

  Opening my eyes, “I beg your pardon, sir.” I needed to explain this. “It’s my fault. I knew too much. I could have solved their problems, with what Feynman had shown me. I could have made the Nazi program work. Put it back on track. Wilhelm would have taken it from there.”

  “Surely you, of all people, would never—”

  “I could, and I would have, sir.”

  The Old Man was shaking his head, showing too much faith in this poor operative.

  I stood up, crossed to the window, and stared outside with hands clasped behind my back, staring at the black statue in the center of the road. Whitehall was a boulevard, I realized, which reminded me too much of Berlin before the war.

  “The sporemist infection,” I said softly, “is reversible, if caught in time. They would have offered me Laura, and I would have given them everything.”

  An avuncular hand descended on my shoulder: the first time the Old Man had touched me since we had shaken hands on our first meeting three years and a lifetime before.

  “It was why he wanted to come over. Wilhelm, I mean.” I sighed. “Too afraid of his masters to remain in place. He’d probably been exaggerating reports of his progress. But if he’d offered them me—”

  No need to point out the obvious.

  “So our new Nazi friend is worthless,” murmured the Old Man.

  The smell of wood polish from the paneling; the redolence of pipe tobacco; the cry of a lone seagull gliding outside. None of it made sense.

  “You did the right thing,” he said.

  Wilhelm Two would never make it to the promised house in Oxford. Instead, out walking on the Marlborough Downs, accompanied by his SOE bodyguards, he would lose his footing on a wet grassy slope and tragically break his neck.

  In Whitehall, nobody mourned.

  Of course we won the war. The hyperdragons would have made a difference, but for all Wilhelm One’s successes, his masters failed to mobilize the resources that would have swung the balance in their favor.

  In the closing days, Stalin’s forces suffered inordinately heavy losses in their bid to be first into Berlin. To many tactically minded observers, it seemed madness, since the Allied powers had agreed to divide the conquered city between them. But to me, it was obvious that the real target was the institute where Wilhelm Two had worked. Stalin wanted nucleic technology for himself: the weaponry that would later prove its power when the Americans’ bomb destroyed so much of the Japanese ecosystem. I could have told Stalin that his men died in vain, but perhaps his own project had been further behind, and whatever knowledge his scientists gained might have been worth the price, in his eyes.

  Afterwards, as the joy of V-E Day swept through London’s thronged streets, it seemed almost impertinent to think of precious individuals lost during the years of darkness, when so many millions, tens of millions, died.

  But that was the point: of the Holocaust victims and the Allied soldiers and the civilians caught in bombing raids, every one had been a real life, defined a world of his or her own.

  I tried to hand in my resignation, but where else would I go? To paint, in New Mexico? In that dream, there had been Laura to share my life. Alone, it was cold and pointless.

  And so I stayed.

  SOE slid into historical oblivion, reinventing itself in peacetime as DI6, then MI6. Even when the Old Man retired, I stayed on throughout the fifties, until I could stand the memories no more.
r />   Every night, I dreamed of Laura.

  One day, early in 1962, I resigned.

  The next morning—in the intelligence community, no one works out their notice—I sat on a bench in Saint James’s Park, reading a Daily Sketch that someone had discarded, drinking in the scents of rhododendron I had been too busy to smell when I ran my five miles at dawn.

  The newspaper headlines were large. After the western world’s paranoia over orbiting Sputniks, this was the sentiment: TIME TO GET OUR OWN BACK.

  By “our” own, they meant the U.S.

  Journalists focus on personalities, and the man in the spotlight was going to ride a fiery dragon up through the sky, and into the darkness beyond. But, behind the headlines … Well, since that notable absence from the Nuremberg trials, I had always known how things would play out.

  It’s been two decades.

  I crumpled up the paper and tossed it into a bin.

  Trafalgar Square, when I walked through it, was scarcely changed from the day the Swastika Bomb dropped and Laura’s life collided with mine, altering everything.

  Whitehall, too, was the same. But, by the time I had passed through Parliament Square and was strolling down Victoria High Street, the buildings were transparent greens and blues and reds, slowly morphing as they cycled through their jelly-forms, while beneath them brightly dressed Londoners rode colorful trexes along boulevards which glistened like a dragonfly’s wings.

  I remembered Leo’s friend Jack, the priest, talking about the importance of history’s turning points, and wondered if Mendel’s legacy was only now coming into its own, truly defining the shape of modern times.

  Westminster Cathedral, like Westminster Abbey at the road’s far end, remained in its original form, surrounding by marvels of shifting bioarchitecture, while one-and two-man albatross-glides circled overhead, enjoying the view.

  I went up the steps, moved quietly inside.

  The high vaulted ceilings were as blackened as before the war, but candles shone brightly and the stained glass windows were magnificent in their rich-hued artistry. Incense was heavy upon the air, as the priest at the high altar celebrated the Mass. Not Jack: he was in South America, on missionary work.