Lost Among the Stars

by Paul Di Filippo

  Of course, having the Via Panisperna Boys all reunited provided a synergy for which even the wonders of America could not fully claim credit.

  Enrico, Edoardo, Bruno, Oscar, Franco, Emilio! And Ettore! The seven men formed as tight a unit as the Benny Goodman or Paul Whiteman or Count Basie bands, each one playing his “instrument” to perfection, in harmony with his bandmates.

  It had only taken a few hours in their joyous company for Majorana to realize just how drab and dull his life in Naples had been without them.

  Majorana’s trip across the Atlantic aboard the USS Blaylock had indeed been comparable to a peaceful cruise. The miraculous sonar had forestalled any attacks. He had studied his notes and chatted with the sailors, seeking to improve his limited English. By the time the ship had arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, under high security, Majorana was calm and rested and tugging at the bit to be active on behalf of the war effort. His “minder,” one Colonel Anson, had seen to it that Majorana was well fed and groomed, then outfitted with a spare suit from Gimbels, new shoes, and—Mama Majorana the prophet!—fresh BVDs. After this efficient and speedy preparation, the two men had hopped into a huge Packard Ninth Series Deluxe Eight 904 sedan limousine and motored south.

  In the town of Princeton, New Jersey, as they pulled up in front of an imposing brick building, Majorana finally summoned up the courage to ask, “Is this our ultimate destination, Colonel? Where are we?”

  Colonel Anson possessed a midwestern drawl. “This here’s the Institute for Advanced Study, where they corral all the eggheads. Your buddies are waiting for you inside.”

  And so—the reunion! Hugging, backslapping, random bursts of scat singing, a chaos of speech as his six comrades collectively tried to bring Majorana up to date on their work while simultaneously quizzing him on conditions back home. Majorana found his buddies essentially unchanged, although they did exhibit a fresh patina of American “hepness.”

  At last their leader, Enrico Fermi, took Majorana aside. “Don’t worry about understanding everything at once, Ettore. You’ll get a better sense of things in the lab tomorrow.”

  The living quarters for the seven Italians were a communal dorm, reminiscent of the original Via Panisperna setup and conducive to much bachelor jollity and pranks, as well as leading to much late-night continuation of the day’s theorizing. (Fermi, their only married member, enjoyed separate lodgings.) But that first evening, after a rich supper, Majorana was too emotionally and physically exhausted to partake of the revelry, and so fell straight asleep to the strains of the gang playing an improvised version of Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose.”

  The promised tour of the lab disclosed further head-spinning wonders to Majorana.

  “Here,” said Fermi, “is our small-scale broadcast power station and receiver. After we lick the problems of scale, we should be able to transmit megawatts of ‘juice’ over the air soon, doing away with the necessity for vehicles to carry fuel, and thus making their range practically infinite. Here’s our apparatus for collimating photons to produce a kind of destructive beam. Here’s our electromagnetic levitation device. Here’s a little gadget that harvests cosmic rays for mutational purposes. And here we have—the Harmonic Cannon!”

  Fermi whisked a tarpaulin off a hulking device, and Majorana was transfixed. The enormous gun rested on a swivel base. Its multi-lobed reaction chamber featured numerous valves, dials, rheostats, slider controls, and warty tubing, while its bulbous barrel was wrapped in coils and radiator fins.

  “What—what does it do?”

  Fermi gripped Majorana by the shoulders and stared into his eyes.

  “Ettore, if you can perfect it, this gun will put an end to war even more effectively than any of our other projects. It is intended to generate waves of a unique frequency and amplitude at the gamma end of the spectrum—your area of expertise. These beams will harmonize with the activity of chordate neural cells from without and impose patterns of nonviolence on the brain. In essence, it is a peace gun.”

  Majorana walked inquisitively around the Harmonic Cannon, saying nothing, only whistling disconnected snatches of Hoagy Carmichaels’s “Lazy River.” His mates watched him with bated breath. He poked and prodded, studied and measured. Finally, he stopped by the rear of the device, draped one arm around it as if it were a favorite horse, and said, “Where is my oscilloscope and Compton Scattering detector, my soldering gun, and my Geiger–Müller counter? I have to get to work!”

  5. Heavy Water Boogie

  The trip from Princeton to the Wharton State Forest, part of the fabled New Jersey Pine Barrens, took almost two hours. The expedition was slowed by having to haul the large, cumbersome trailer that carried the Harmonic Cannon—carefully concealed from the innocent eyes of citizens or the prying eyes of foreign agents. But after their leisurely drive, the caravan of vehicles pulled into the park, which had been closed off by soldiers to all public access.

  The Panisperna Boys hopped out of the cars and trucks and began erecting tents and cook stoves for their indefinite stay.

  If circumstances conspired, they were about to test the perfected Harmonic Cannon on the most challenging subject possible.

  The Jersey Devil.

  Already, some two months after first being introduced to the Cannon and laboring intensively around the clock on its esoteric innards, Majorana had made several trials of its pacifying rays. The beams had been tested on raging wild animals borrowed from zoos, with seemingly good results. Even charging, roaring lions went pussycat soft. But essential human trials had been disallowed by government fiat. Recent public scandals about lethal testing on prisoners made the government leery of such trials. No one knew if the beams would cause brain damage, and even condemned prisoners were deemed sacrosanct.

  So, somewhat desperately, a plan was devised to employ a man-like creature out of myth as subject.

  The Jersey Devil was a quasi-human beast of fierce reputation, known to inhabit the Pine Barrens southeast of Princeton. The scheme was to employ the Harmonic Cannon against one or more of the angry cryptids, then secure another specimen that had not been bathed in rays. Dissection and comparison of the two brains, subject and control, would reveal much.

  The experiment began slowly.

  Several days of beating the dense scrub bushes of the Barrens, with the help of dubious GIs, had to be first endured. Majorana ended each day covered with various tree saps, scratched and prickled, and exhausted. He fell into a deep and dreamless sleep immediately after a short “jam session” with the boys around their campfire, with Majorana playing the steam-powered harmonica of his own invention.

  But finally, success! There came a day when they flushed out not one, but two cryptids!

  As planned, the soldiers managed to herd one of the Devils into a cage, to serve later as control subject under a planned dissection.

  Responsibility for the other shrieking, galloping beast fell to the Panisperna Boys.

  “Stand back, you GIs!” Fermi shouted. “This is a job for science!”

  The Jersey Devil looked like something out of Lewis Carroll’s most drunken, opium-tinged, debauched nightmare. Bipedal, rearing seven feet tall on crooked, hooved lower legs, it boasted a wide, muscled torso from which sprouted tiny hooved forelegs. Bat-like wings grew from its shoulder blades. Its long neck terminated in a furry boxy head full of blunt teeth, a head that resembled a mix of donkey, kangaroo, and hippo.

  At first, the creature, subjected to glancing rays from the Harmonic Cannon, appeared almost unaffected. It continued to charge about, bellowing, with random feints and gnashings of its choppers, often fluttering a foot or two off the ground.

  Majorana was amazed. He had seen many astonishing things in the last few days, but was not quite prepared to witness some sort of alien being, with wings like a bat and red eyes. Immediately, he thought of the passage from Dante, when the poet describes Charon, “around whose eyes glared wheeling flames.”

  Riding high at the control
s of the Harmonic Cannon while his comrades sought to distract the flame-eyed beast like picadors in a bullring, Majorana ramped up the wattage of the pacifying gamma rays. He swiveled the Cannon to track the Devil, then fired once more!

  The invisible beam must have hit the Devil full on, but there was no immediate effect except to enrage it further! It now hurled itself through the air to knock Majorana right off his perch on the Cannon, sending him down to the thankfully soft earth.

  Majorana had the wind knocked out of him and saw a whole galaxy of stars. Further stifling his breath, the brutish Devil kneeled on his chest. The scientist struggled to inhale, and got a snootful of the Devil’s goatish musk. He prepared to feel the creature’s teeth in his gullet.…

  But then, suddenly, all pressure was removed as the Devil collapsed sideways to the soil.

  Majorana levered himself up weakly onto one elbow.

  Fermi crouched by the Devil. He whispered a few words to those pacified “eyes of wheeling flames.” The devil appeared to purr. He was calm as a drowsy kitten—the creature was calm! The Harmonic Cannon had worked!

  Majorana breathed a sigh of relief. Then suddenly his mere scientific happiness turned to carnal paradise, for a beautiful young Latina woman in uniform was cradling him in her arms!

  “Who—who are you?”

  “I’m Captain Hemiola Jones, Army Nurse Corps. But you can call me Iola, chief. You’re just a bum civilian, after all. I’ve been assigned to make sure you crazy boys don’t kill yourselves—or anyone else. Now, let me check you over.”

  Iola began unbuttoning Majorana’s shirt and he blushed. He stammered a protest, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Listen, Giuseppe, besides being a trained nurse, I grew up in Havana with six brothers in an apartment the size of an Oldsmobile. You ain’t got nothing I haven’t seen in spades.”

  All of Majorana’s buddies were ringed around the medical tableau, leering and catcalling as if they stood on the Piazza Navona, ogling the lovers there.

  Bruno said, “I can count his heartbeats per minute from here!”

  “And since he’s Sicilian, we know his blood is hot!” Edoardo said.

  “Why do the young and good-looking guys have all the luck!” Emilio quipped ruefully.

  Franco suggested, “Hey, let’s all get the tame Devil to scratch us so we can get some tender loving care, too!”

  Majorana endured the examination and teasing. Finally, he was pronounced fit, except for some abrasions, which the competent nurse treated with iodine. With a strong grip, Captain Iola helped him to stand.

  The pacified Devil had been carted away. Enrico Fermi was yelling orders. “Come on, guys! Let’s break camp and get back to Princeton. This is the perfect opportunity to try out that new calibrated axial tomography rig we put together!”

  The Panisperna Boys scattered, leaving Majorana and Iola alone together.

  “My name is not Giuseppe,” Majorana quietly said.

  “Aw, shucks, I knew that already. Just cracking wise on you! You’re Hector. Good Cuban name!”

  Hector? Was this to be his new American identity? Majorana tried on the changed name mentally and found it not unappealing.

  Majorana realized to his consternation that he was still holding Iola’s hand. Their eyes locked like two subatomic particles colliding in a vacuum chamber.

  “Do you think—that is—I mean, might you be available for dinner back at the Institute? A private one?”

  “Of course, Hector. I’d like that.”

  Majorana practically flew back to the tents and equipment, outperforming his comrades like a man with a mission.

  * * *

  With some amusement, Iola Jones watched the smitten Catanian scientist bustle about. Then she walked to a parked Hudson Terraplane and climbed inside.

  Out of sight in the shadows, Agent Succi sat in the broad backseat of the car. He was annotating a complex chart with intense precision.

  “You appear to have bonded successfully, Jones.”

  “It wasn’t hard. He’s a sweet kid.”

  “Well, Professor Fermi told me that this ‘sweet kid’ is pretty special. We have plans for him in the future. And you’ll be there to help make sure that he complies.”

  “Do these plans concern, oh, ‘heavy water’?”

  Agent Succi directed a frozen stare at the nurse. “Your security clearance stops well short of that information, Jones. Don’t give me cause to bring Hoover snooping into your career. You would not find the experience a pleasant one, I assure you.”

  6. Radon Syncopation

  Seated in the cavernous belly of the B-17 Flying Fortress, Ettore “Hector” Majorana fussed nervously with the straps of his parachute. His orders did not include any planned use of the chute; he had to wear it, like the rest of the crew, only in case of emergency “ditching” of the plane, should the German defenses succeed in shooting their craft down. Nonetheless, just wearing the rig increased his nervousness and brought home the seriousness of his situation, and this whole mad attempt to squelch a conflict that was already boiling over across Europe and beyond.

  In the many months since Hitler’s defiant, greedy, and mad invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1934, the German forces had continued to assault almost every other nation on the continent. Most had fallen, with France holding out only by the slimmest of margins, and looking doomed to imminent defeat as well. Perfidious, heartbreaking Italy had tossed in their lot with the Bavarian dictator, as had Spain.

  The Via Panisperna Boys’ home—the state shaped like a peaceful, homely boot, Italy—for a few weeks was left out of the war. But then Mussolini had said in one of his typical pompous and long-winded speeches: “I have to lay on the table of peace a few thousand deaths.” And he found them. A few thousand young Italians were killed in just one month of war.

  Hector thought of them now, and grieved, as his plane flew through the dark skies.

  So likewise had the war spread to Scandinavia and North Africa. Hitler had obvious designs on the United Kingdom as well, but had not yet made his challenges formally. The Soviet Union sat quietly for the moment on the sidelines, but that could not last. And in the Pacific sphere, the Japanese pursued similar dreams of conquest.…

  It was only months before America herself would become embroiled. The whole world appeared poised on the verge of a volcano, much as Catania sat at the mercy of Etna. And he knew what it meant to have your ass hanging over hot lava.

  And here he was, one scientist in a plane, seeking to cut the violent heart out of the whole war effort.

  They would not have even dared to try such a mad scheme were it not for the encouraging results of the Jersey Devil trial.

  Both creatures had been sacrificed, and their brains examined and compared. The conclusion was that the brain of the Devil hit by the ray had been altered permanently and significantly—but in the most benign fashion. Neural pathways deemed conducive to peaceful behavior had replaced those connections devoted to belligerence. No other faculties had been affected.

  The device was safe and ethically justified for use on dangerous humans!

  Ideally, hundreds if not thousands of Harmonic Cannons would have been rushed into production. They could have then been massed at various fronts around the fighting forces and deployed. The pacifying rays would allow the “peace troops” to work inward, cutting a trail of nonviolence, until the land forces reached the heart of the conflict, Berlin, and neutralized Hitler himself.

  But there was only one problem: the construction of the Harmonic Cannon involved rare substances and handcrafted circuits and could not be turned into an assembly-line process. At the moment, there was still only the one device. It resided now not in Princeton but in an oversized “ball turret” beneath the plane, aboard which Majorana rode. And since “Hector” was the expert on the guts of the device and able to quickly implement any instant repairs, he had been dispatched on this crazy mission: to zap Hitler and his upper echelons from the skies, i
n whatever Führerhauptquartiere the dictator might occupy. There were several such locations, and this flight would attempt to nail them all in one night. Extra fuel tanks occupied the space normally reserved for bombs or cargo.

  Majorana thought of how proudly he had volunteered for this mission. Once Fermi, flanked by US generals and politicians, had outlined the mission, Majorana had stepped forth boldly. True, Iola’s presence in the room had lent an additional impetus to his bravery. Would he ever return to pursue his relationship with the alluring young Latina? Or would his bones bleach on some unmarked field? Oh, well, never let it be said that he had held back when the world needed him!

  The Cannon itself was under the control of a young and confident sergeant named Sol Vespers, who was an ace gunner. Vespers thought the job a cushy assignment. “Hell, this weird gun don’t even gotta protrude through the turret, so I stay warm as the tootsies of a dancehall floozie! Plus, I only gotta spray some whole acres at a time, not even pinpoint one building. I might as well be home in Brooklyn eating my mama’s Sunday dinner!”

  Majorana wished he could share the gunner’s confidence and aplomb. But in truth, he dared not hope for success. And high security had prevented him from even writing a last farewell to his mother!

  It was amazing that they had given him, a Sicilian scientist, a guy named Vespers. Such was the smiling face of Fate! Vespers, the name of the fabled revolution in the thirteenth century that had seen the Sicilians revolt and expel the French from the island! Now he and his “Vespers” were going to kick Hitler and his followers out of Europe. It was imperative they succeed, for the future of all humanity.

  The plane with the unique Harmonic Cannon now neared its first destination, flying high at a safe distance above the selected Führerhauptquartiere. It was strange how little air defense manifested. Of course, the Nazis did not have sonar or its companion, radar. And they had crushed all continental air forces who could threaten them, so expected no incursions. Maybe Hitler foolishly felt very safe in his well-barricaded fortress, or was very sure he had already won the war. But in any case, this omission was one incredible error by the Nazis.