Red, White, and the Blues

by Walker, Rysa

  Yesterday marked the largest paid attendance to date since the Fair opened, despite record-breaking heat. Vehicles from many different states filled the parking lots as people arrived not merely to see the Fair and the Jewish Palestine Pavilion but also in protest of the British government’s recent release of a White Paper on Palestine, widely viewed as a repudiation of the Balfour Declaration and its stated goal of creating a permanent home for the Jewish people.

  As many as 100,000 people crowded into the Court of Peace to hear the dedication speeches by the mayor, Mr. Grover Whalen (president of the World’s Fair), and Professor Einstein, who summed up the view of many in attendance, stating that “England has, in part, ignored its sacred pledge. Remember, however, that in the life of a people and especially in times of need, there can be only one source of security, namely: confidence in one’s own strength and steadfastness. There could be no greater calamity than a permanent discord between us and the Arab people.”

  ∞23∞

  TYSON

  BETHESDA, DC

  NOVEMBER 19, 2136

  “Yeah,” Alex says as he follows my gaze toward the giant countdown clock, where the current reading is 23:59:06 and counting. “It makes me nervous, too. I tried turning the screen off, but it popped right back up and gave me a warning about non-team members staying away from the console.”

  “I was more wondering about the mirrors and the noise,” I tell him, nodding toward the four mirrored doors that are propped up against each other, forming a wall around the SimMaster. In addition, the library, which is usually quiet, is now buzzing with several different variants of white noise emanating from a speaker near the simulation machine, but also at lower levels from the house intercom. “It sounds like we’re in the middle of a restaurant located under a waterfall in the middle of a thunderstorm.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I can keep the sim machine from getting into my data, but I’m still a bit worried that we’re being recorded. Too bad it’s not old school like the display for the Anomalies Machine. We could toss a blanket over it and reduce the anxiety.”

  The Anomalies Machine brings its own form of anxiety, however. While there are no large red numbers counting down our impending doom, the differences between our current timeline and the one we’d like to return to keep scrolling past on the display.

  Richard blinked in a couple of minutes before I did, and he’s looking at several photographs on the wall screen. “Leon was a bit camera shy,” he says, “but I found this from the contempt-of-Congress trial when he was sentenced for refusing to testify before your old friend HUAC.”

  “Back when the House’s idea of un-American activities was confined to communists, rather than including the Klan, I guess.”

  “Unfortunately,” Rich says, “I also found this.” An entirely different picture pops up. The man is about the same age, but much better looking.

  “Definitely not the same guy. So which one is right?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say the first one, since it’s a bit closer to the appearance of his brother, and we have a ton of photos of Barney. But the second picture was used in several online histories of the trial. I’d chalk it up to his hobby of passport falsification. That seems to have been almost as popular an FBI excuse for bringing suspects in as tax evasion, except you change the name, not the photo. Josephson was almost certainly a spy, though. He was apparently part of a Soviet plan to assassinate Hitler in the mid-1930s. But my brain kept trying to make a connection to something else. I kept hearing that Billie Holiday song ‘Strange Fruit.’ You know it, right?”

  “Yeah. I um . . . kind of heard her sing it when I was at Café Society.”

  Rich shakes his head. “Seriously, Tyce? While I was freezing my ass off in Detroit listening to an egomaniac priest, you’re in a club listening to Billie fucking Holiday. Which sucks double, because if we do go there, it will have to be before the club opens, and I still won’t get to hear her in person. Leon was the moneyman, so he was around a lot more during the start-up phase. Anyway, getting back to my point, that song kept sticking in my head. I shrugged it off because I couldn’t really see why a song about lynching would have anything to do with our current situation, but then Jarvis pops up the info about the club, and I see the name Abel Meeropol. He’s the guy who wrote the song. And he also ended up raising the kids of two people who were executed for trafficking in nuclear secrets.”

  “The Rosenbergs?” I ask.

  “Yup. Which proves absolutely nothing where either of the Josephson brothers are concerned. I’m not going to start down the path of drawing elaborate webs of conspiracy like that Dilling woman Katherine talked to in Detroit—while you were in a club drinking beer and watching Billie Holiday.”

  “And also nearly getting killed in the alley. I think I’d have rather dealt with cold weather and the egomaniac priest.”

  He gives me a point-taken nod. “Fair enough. Anyway, I’m not saying that the Josephsons are traitors or whatever simply because they knew the guy who was a friend of the Rosenbergs well enough to help him launch his very controversial song, or because the club was frequented by communists. But there were rumors that Leon was involved in trying to get nuclear secrets to the Soviets. I don’t know how much of that was true and how much was J. Edgar Hoover’s imagination. Still, I think there’s a decent chance Team Viper would have seen this and decided Leon Josephson might be a good person to pull into their scheme to pass information along, either to Einstein or to this physicist Tomonaga. Josephson is tangentially related, but maybe offbeat enough that they get a few extra probability points.”

  “But if Josephson was trafficking secrets to the USSR,” I say, “why would he give anything to the Japanese? They were on the opposite end of the political spectrum at this point, right? The only way that makes sense to me is if he was a mercenary.”

  “I’m pretty sure he was a true believer,” Rich says. “But Alex has a theory on that.”

  “Jack knows more about this than I do,” Alex says, “since he does a lot of military history. So you might want to check with him for details. But I do know this would be around the same time as the nonaggression pact. Stalin’s whole reason for going into that was to get the capitalist powers all fighting each other, while he stood on the sidelines and watched them wipe each other out. And Josephson doesn’t have the benefit of knowing that Japan is going to attack the US. In 1939, they were still professing eternal friendship. That was even true the next summer. It’s pretty much the entire point of the Japan Day ceremony where the Japanese ambassador is shot at.”

  I sink down onto the couch and rub my forehead. “How does this physicist . . . Tomonaga? And the super-time theory. How does all of that fit in?”

  “Super-many-time theory,” Alex says. “It’s complicated, but the short version is that it’s a quantum electrodynamics theory connected to renormalization.” He pauses, scanning our faces for a sign that we’re following. I don’t know what he gets from Rich, but I’m pretty sure my own expression conveys that he lost me somewhere around quantum. “Basically, Dr. Tomonaga proposed that every point in space has its own clock, or its own time. Which builds a bridge of sorts between quantum field theory and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Tomonaga was studying in Germany when the war broke out. He’s on his way back to Japan when he stops for a day at the Fair. The other guy with him was a fellow student. And here’s the interesting catch—Tomonaga was studying under Heisenberg.” He waits, apparently expecting a reaction. “Heisenberg? Werner Heisenberg?”

  “I’m remembering something about an uncertainty principle,” Rich says.

  “But are you certain?” I ask. Both of them give me a look that suggests I should probably just stay out of this.

  “He was in charge of the Nazis’ nuclear weapons research,” Alex says. “He actually ended up telling them it wasn’t doable with the resources they had, and there’s some speculation that it was a principled decision on his part because he didn’
t really want the Nazis to win. But at any rate, Tomonaga would have been well positioned to get any information about nuclear weapons into the hands of people who might understand the ramifications.”

  I leave them to discuss the details of this and go downstairs to see if I can locate Lorena and get this serum she’s been working on. As I head down the curved staircase, I instead find Thea and the baby, whose name I can’t remember, both seated on the tile floor of the foyer. Thea stacks a small red cup-shaped block on top of a tower of three other colored blocks.

  “Your turn, Yun Hee!” she says to the baby, who reaches out with her chubby hands and sends the tower crashing to the floor. “Yay!” Thea says enthusiastically as the baby claps her hands. “Good job. And now it’s my turn.”

  I sit on the bottom step and watch them for a moment until Thea looks up. “Aren’t you supposed to be fixing the timeline?” she asks. “Is Madi with you?”

  “No. She’ll probably make the next trip. And yes, we’re working on fixing it. I just need to find Lorena and . . . RJ?” I hesitate, not certain I have the name correct.

  “They’re having sex,” Thea says. “Lorena has been very stressed, getting this serum finished, and she doesn’t know if it will work. I offered to watch the baby.”

  “Okay,” I tell her. “I need to talk to you for a moment anyway. The rules say that all team members must contribute, and while I think that watching the little one here is indeed a contribution . . . I’m not sure that the SimMaster 8560, or whatever model they’ve got hooked up in there, will agree on that point. And we’re going to be spread a bit thin trying to get our moves accomplished quickly and in the right order anyway. So do you think you could watch a specific stable point through your key and then enter the moves into the system?”

  “I can certainly try,” she says cheerily.

  Given everything that’s on the line, I’d much prefer to have her say that it will be a snap. But it seems like a truthful answer, even if it’s not exactly a comforting one.

  “After all,” she adds, “I’m here to help. In The Verses of Prudence, it tells us to watch for the signs to appear within the ‘Chapter of Prudence’ in The Book of Prophecy. And then the Chosen Sister must take her place and follow the guidance of the One. The Verses have been handed down to each group of Sisters, from the Alpha to the current three.”

  “So . . . you were chosen to come here because of something in The Book of Prophecy?”

  “No,” she says. “I am chosen because of Madi. The ‘Chapter of Prudence’ merely gave us the sign of the change, and now I must follow The Verses.”

  “The verses in the ‘Chapter of Prudence’ from The Book of Prophecy?”

  Thea laughs. “No! Our Verses are not in the ‘Chapter of Prudence.’ The Verses are the testament and decree of the Sister. The Book and Chapter are handed down from the Templars,” she says with a dismissive wave of her hand. “And they hide most of it anyway. But they will never hear The Verses. We are the keepers. We do not write. We only speak.”

  I nod, pretending to understand the word salad she just dished up, and tell her that I’m going to go in search of a drink. I’m now really feeling that we need a backup plan for entering the moves into the system. We’ll have to let her do something, since the rules seem to say all team members must participate, but I’m reluctant to put too much responsibility in her hands, given that her cognitive skills seem a bit sketchy, to say the least. Although Madi might be a better judge of how much she can handle.

  The kitchen is a disaster zone, with beakers and vials in the sink and papers stacked on the island area in the center of the room. “Jarvis, is there alcohol in this place?”

  “Yes. The cabinet by James Coleman’s desk in the library contains a partial bottle of vodka, an almost full bottle of gin, a bottle of rum—”

  “That’s okay,” I say. “The gin sounds good.”

  “Perhaps. Mistress pronounced it nasty on the one occasion she sampled it.”

  “Guess we’ll see.”

  I grab a couple of small glasses from a shelf near the sink and head back up to the library, sidestepping Thea and the baby, who are still playing their game. As it turns out, there are already several shot glasses on top of the cabinet. I pour a few fingers of gin into one of them and discover that Madi’s assessment isn’t wrong.

  “Do you want one?” I ask Rich.

  He frowns. “No. It’s still morning.”

  I glance at the windows, which are dark, and he says it’s morning for him, pointing out that alcohol and Wheaties probably won’t combine well in my stomach.

  True. But I’m hoping the gin will untangle my brain after my conversation with Thea just now. “What is that?” I ask, nodding at a new addition to Alex’s cluster of displays. Three of them are still covered with the dots he’s been using to display chronotron pulses, but one is now covered with what looks like wires.

  “These are trace chronotron pulses,” he says. “There was a filter in place to get rid of noise in the system. I decided that might be cloaking some data points, so I dialed the filter back and set up a subroutine to isolate and catalog them. Based on the early results, I decided to amplify those signals in a separate program.”

  “Yeah . . . but what is it?” I ask. “I mean, what do the bundles represent?”

  “Signals from alternate universes. Or, at least, that’s my theory.”

  Many of the lines are part of a massive tangle at the top of the display. Others are grouped, clamped together at one end the way you’d tie off old-school electrical wires, although most of these bundles are fatter. On the left side of the screen, the bundles are clear, and they remind me a bit of cellophane noodles. On the right side, the bundles are colored wires, lined up in a spectrum from vivid to faint and back to vivid. The colored bundles are labeled alphabetically, ranging from A to Q, and the brightest, most vibrant group near the middle is labeled H. It’s also the narrowest of the colored bundles, with just seven colored strands. It’s different from the others in another way, too. A–G and I–Q are perfectly smooth lines, but H has tiny little projections that shoot off and then disappear, like split ends on a hair.

  As we watch, a clear wire from the tangled mass at the top separates and joins one of the clear bundles on the right.

  “Of course, this is a simplification and a bit of a misrepresentation, because I need to view them separately right now.” Alex flicks the screen with his finger to shift to another view where the wires all start as a single massive cord and then unravel into hundreds of separate threads. “This is a more accurate picture of the paths. I got the idea from a book I was reading, and also from the signal I picked up here in the house on the occasions when Madi spun off a splinter.”

  Rich points toward the one marked H. “That’s us, right? 47H. That’s what Morgen called us.”

  Alex nods. “As much as I hate to take his label, it’s a starting point. I have our signal as the baseline. This is a really rough analogy, but you can think of it as similar to pitch, with the earlier letters being the lower notes and the later ones higher. Carrying the analogy further, there may be others in our group, as well, but their ‘pitch’ is either too low or too high for me to measure. And here’s where the analogy breaks down, because I don’t know what you’d call the little spurs from the splinters.”

  Rich shrugs. “Reverb, maybe? Or an echo. Why don’t the others have those?”

  “They most likely do,” Alex says. “I’m just not able to drill down in enough detail to measure them. Or at least, not yet.”

  “The colors are the same as the ones on the other displays,” I say, nodding toward the one next to us. “Are the lines just another way to show that data?”

  “Yes. Some of the data points,” he says, clicking the purple strand in the H-bundle, which has a few of the feathery offshoots, mostly at the end. “This is you.” He clicks the amber strand, which is much shorter, with a similar number of splinter strands. “Madi.” And then he
clicks the dark-red strand, which is longer than the other two, and has dozens, maybe even as many as a hundred, of red tendrils, most of them near the end. Some appear to be thinner than others. The effect is a bit like a frayed red shoelace.

  “Saul has been busy,” Rich says. “So . . . what’s the end goal of all this?”

  “Finding a way to keep Team Viper out. At least, that’s what I’m aiming at. But I have less data for the clear variants. Right now, I’d be glad just to be able to pinpoint which cluster Team Viper belongs to. At least then we could let them know that they are seen, if you get my drift. They might have a way of blocking outsiders from coming in, but so far, I’m not picking up anything that is similar to the sort of interference I would, personally, use to block their entry. So it’s possible that they were arrogant enough to break into our house without bothering to lock their own door. And I need one of you to try something for me. Thea’s the only one here who can use the key, and I tried it with her, but let’s just say the response was a little garbled.”

  Alex reaches over to the far side of his desk and retrieves a key that’s inside a device that keeps it activated. He flips it over. “As you can see from the hyphen in CHRO-NOS, this is one of the keys we um . . . captured . . . from their observers.” He grimaces slightly, clearly thinking about what the loss of the keys cost those observers, and then goes on. “Anyway, as I noted before, the key was fine for maintaining the protective field around the house, but it was on a slightly different frequency. That got me to thinking about why the frequency might be different. I had Madi transfer a stable point to this key earlier and made some minor adjustments. Thea said the location is this room and that there were books, but then she sort of went off on a tangent.”