Dryden had been staring down into the flames. His gaze snapped up now, meeting Whitcomb’s. Beside him, Marnie did the same.
Whitcomb nodded. “He heard that in the desert in North Africa, in 1942. At the time, he had no reason to think it was anything strange. Just some song he wasn’t familiar with. How it was being broadcast in Algeria, he couldn’t imagine. Maybe someone was transmitting English music out of occupied France. Maybe the machine could pull in signals from that far out, all the way across the Mediterranean. Or farther. Maybe Britain.”
Whitcomb took hold of a two-by-four sticking out of the tire rim on his side. He used it like a poker, prodding at the bed of coals below.
“I saw for myself the moment it hit him,” he said. “I remember the date. February 9, 1964. I was ten years old. I guess just about anyone my age remembers the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, but it’s not the show itself I remember now. What I remember is my dad getting up off the couch, his expression like I’d never seen it before. I remember him going into the kitchen and splashing water on his face, and my mom asking him what was wrong, and I remember that he couldn’t answer her. He went up in the attic and got out some old boxes of his stuff from the war. Journals he’d kept at the time. In 1964, he was still in the military. Still working in intelligence. I remember him putting his coat on, after he came back downstairs, and saying he had to go to work. And then he left, and I didn’t see him again for weeks.”
Whitcomb set aside the two-by-four and went on. “I learned the whole story years later, when I was in military intel myself, and working with him. In the days after that television broadcast, my father tracked down some of the former OSS men who’d been with him in North Africa. Men who’d gone to that site. Together they got clearance to dig into the old paperwork that had been found there, and even to lead an expedition out to that spot in the Sahara where the site had been. They didn’t find much there. They had better luck with the boxes of papers, which were lab notes by the Germans who’d built that machine, in 1942. But the notes were incomplete. Most of them had been burned before the American commandos secured the site. What was left was … frustrating. Like a treasure map missing half the route, including the X to mark the spot.”
“The U.S. military wanted to build their own version of that machine?” Dryden asked. “If they could figure it out?”
Whitcomb nodded. “But there was more to it than that. Think of all the questions they had to consider. Had those few Germans out in the desert really been the only ones who knew about this technology, or did others know? If there were others, what happened to them? When the U.S. and Russia divided up Nazi scientists after the war, like battle spoils, could the Russians have gotten someone who knew how to build one of those machines? In 1964, when my father and his colleagues started digging into this, the Cold War was pretty close to its worst days. It was like the whole government ran on paranoia. There were serious incentives to look into this matter. But … there was also no proof any of it was true. Just my father’s say-so, versus all common sense. The one bit of evidence he had was his journal from the North Africa campaign; he’d actually written that Beatles line in it. In ’64, the military went as far as running chemical analysis on the ink he’d used to write it, and they determined it was a hell of a lot older than the song ‘She Loves You.’ I think that test bought my father and his friends more credibility than anything else, but only to a point. Try looking at it from the military’s perspective, back then. What’s the more likely explanation? That an intel officer really heard a message from the future, back in 1942, or that he found a way to make ink that could fuck with the chemical tests? What would you believe?”
Marnie said, “So what happened?”
“A half measure,” Whitcomb said. “The military analyzed the paperwork from that site and pulled from it everything they could make sense of. Everything that offered a hint of how the machine might have worked. They weren’t willing to spend money on trying to build another one; there had to be a million ways to interpret those technical notes. A million different machines you could build, on the off chance one would be the right one. If there was a right one. If the whole thing wasn’t a fantasy.”