Timestream Two
1963
Eliani Hadntz
November 22
THE HUMAN BRAIN was distantly capable of understanding that the possibility existed for what Eliani Hadntz now called Q, for kinetic knowledge of Q and the ability to actually use and manipulate it via “thought.” Scientists had nosed around it for years, like tiny fish nibbling on a huge kernel of corn drifting through their waters. Nibble and dart, nibble and dart. Physicists, biologists, biochemists, neurologists, even novelists; even theologians and philosophers. Nicking off little bits, swallowing them. A dangerous idea. Too radical, too like Augustine’s God, simply That Which Was Outside the Boundaries of Thought. The Unknown. So the idea had never been devoured; digested. It remained ever-drifting, an object of fascination, a type of hunger, a cipher for a hunger never satisfied, sought through the substitutes of war, money, worship, science, gardening, needlepoint, car racing, and sports: something ultimate.
And so the infinite tunneling pathways of Q remained undiscovered, unexplored, unexploited.
Until now. She had not created them, merely intuited their existence, studied and defined them, as electricity, atomic fission, and DNA had been illuminated and used by humans, and created her Device. Her alternative to war’s solution to war, which always resulted in more war. An alternative that might bring peace.
And suddenly, now reached backward, forward, sideways, around all corners, to encompass Everything. The singing strings of which the universe was composed could be known, and used. Humans could learn how to play their own music of time at last.
At least they would at some point in this process, which might be a long one. Or which might happen in just one or two generations: an evolutionary leap.
That was, roughly, what Dr. Eliani Hadntz was thinking on this particular afternoon, November 22, 1963, in this new timestream.
She perched on a stool in a dingy bar in Dallas, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, a red bandana knotted around her neck, drinking a cold long-neck Bud while pool balls cracked off one another behind her. She was watching John F. Kennedy’s speech at the Dallas Trade Mart, the speech he had intended to make the afternoon of November 22, 1963, on a small black-and-white TV that sat on the bar. She was the only one in the bar who seemed interested in the President’s speech. She’d paid the bartender a dollar to change the channel.
She had to meet with Bette at some point. Hadntz was not sure where Bette was right now, but she was in extreme danger. Bette was resourceful. She would know what to do in any circumstance, yet Hadntz was uneasy. The exceedingly complex, vast computational power of Q had shown that World Prime had been headed toward some very heavy storms, which included global environmental disaster, increased proliferation of nuclear weapons and the will to use them, financial disasters of great magnitude, and widespread, willful ignorance of scientific education. Consciously controlled evolution would ensue on this new path, where the Dance family, except for Bette, resided now. But whose consciousness, whose idea of goodness? Hadntz was not the first person to think deeply about how to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of people, plants, animals, and the living membranes of air and water in which they lived, but she was the first who had ever attempted to try to affect such change using the tools of mathematics, physics, and the biological sciences.
Others who knew about the existence of the Device were few, but powerful, and most definitely not altruistic. Would Q, at this point, even allow itself to be used for a negative purpose? It might still be fragile enough to be vulnerable. And certainly Sam, Megan, Jill, and Brian Dance were fragile, though Sam and Jill were the only ones who knew about the Device. And Wink—Alan Winklemeyer—knew. His timestream had diverged from World Prime within a day after the Device’s true activation, in the presence of Sam and Wink, in the observation plane that flew with the Enola Gay. Wink was a curious man. Rather a playboy, he had never married, and found himself, with the rest of their Army compatriots, in Sam’s company during their reunions—though he and Sam were the only ones who realized the intersection of timestreams, that nexes, and knew how it had come about. Since then, he had gained some skill in traversing timestreams, as had Hadntz long ago. But where was he now?
Ah, where were they all? Dead and gone; ashes. Her renowned father, lecturer in physics in Vienna, who had enabled her physics doctorate; her mother, Rosa, with a medical degree from Switzerland, the only place she could get one in Europe at the time, but could not practice, nor own property, in Vienna. Freud, in whose salons Hadntz had participated; Lise Meitner, whom she had met at the German front in Lviv, Poland, 1915, where she was doctoring and Meitner was taking X-rays and avoiding developing poison gas at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Her former fiancé, who died in her arms in that same hospital, gassed, who had married another woman because he had not wanted to marry a woman doctor … so very, very many, gone in this war-torn century. Rosa had died in a concentration camp at the end of the war, captured in a hospital in Budapest, while Eliani had been elsewhere in Europe, developing her Device, which might save millions of future children from the same fate: the most terrible choice she had ever made, for surely, she could have saved her mother. Yet, her mother would have understood her choice completely, for she had fiercely reared her daughter to make such choices, to be in a position to be able to actually make changes. Big changes.
Hadntz dashed away tears with a bar napkin. She had neither time nor tolerance for self-pity. She had made hard choices. No one would ever know their depth, or their cost.
She had recruited Bette during Kristallnacht, in Vienna, and Bette had worked her own relationship with Dulles and the OSS to enable secret development of the Device, which kept it out of the hands of any government. Bette, and Sam, had paid the price too, of their own free will. Their only mistake had been in thinking they could protect their children.
She, Hadntz, could seemingly live “forever,” whatever that meant, fragmented among timestreams, continuing her work. In other timestreams, which repeatedly branched, she was an internationally lauded scientist. But she was repeatedly and strongly drawn to this timestream, just one step removed from that of her birth. If hunger for a long life had ever mattered to her, that hunger was long extinguished—except for her desire to help humanity change for the better. After her husband had died, and after all the atrocities she had witnessed, during two world wars that lay bare the darkest corners of humanity’s appetite for atrocity, her own life seemed unimportant to her, just one life among billions. But on a larger scale, regarding her work, it mattered tremendously. She still envisioned an egalitarian world, free of all that was worst in human nature. An Africa, Middle East, Asia, and South America free from the legacy of colonization, artificial nations, corruption. That world was based on universal, science-based education, which Dr. Montessori had so brilliantly pioneered, and which continued to evolve as its tenets were confirmed by FMRI and other tools. The path was not easy, but her training in the biological as well as physical sciences was an unusual combination, giving her a uniquely wide view of the physicality of consciousness, and of the brain’s astounding plasticity, in which she placed all her faith. Change for the better could and would sweep across the world, perhaps in a very short time, much as the printed word had washed away the Dark Ages. But this change would spring from human biology itself.
Focusing once again on a small, black-and-white Kennedy, Eliani Hadntz allowed herself a rare second of satisfaction: surely there were a lot of pissed-off people in Washington right now.
Familiar heartache eclipsed her satisfaction. At least, this sadness confirmed, for her, that she was still human. This event, for those who could straddle the timestreams—and this event would, in itself, help spread that capacity—spectacularly confirmed the existence of the Device, which she, Bette, Sam, and Wink had kept secret from most of the intelligence community. They would relentlessly pursue Bette and her family for the notes, the knowledge. For the Device itself.
Bette would have to vanish.
Hadntz motioned to the bartender to turn up the volume as Kennedy wound up his speech:
“Finally, it should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America that practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America that has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society.”
Equal rights. Social justice. Education. Economics. Those were the high points, and she fully agreed. Who wouldn’t? The main question was whether or not Kennedy had the clout to carry through on his vision.
At least now he had a chance to try.
Hadntz slid off the barstool, slapped a dollar on the counter, and headed for the door. She had to keep watch over the Dance family now. They were her responsibility.
It was time to get back to work.
She knew by now: The War, and her work on the Device, would never end.
Bette
December 1963, Battle Creek, Michigan
THE MAN BEHIND the mahogany desk at General Mills in Battle Creek, Michigan, responded to the secretary on his intercom: “Who?”
“Mrs. Bette Elegante.”
“I don’t recall the name. Do I have an appointment with her?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is the nature of the appointment?”
“She says that it is national interest.”
“Tell her she has five minutes.”
The woman who entered his spacious office on that winter day wore a subdued black business suit. Her blond hair was perfectly coiffed in a flip. High heels showed off rather spectacular legs.
He rose and held out his hand. “Hello. Fred Alexander.”
She shook his hand firmly and quickly. “My name is Bette Elegante, and I would like to propose a business arrangement. My firm has developed a line of inexpensive, exciting toys for cereal boxes.”
“We already have arrangements with—”
She had already set her briefcase on his desk. She opened it and took out a plastic case, the lid of which displayed a picture of a large American flag planted on what appeared to be the moon.
He leaned forward. “All right, as long as you’re here, what do you have?”
She opened the box, removed one small figure, and set it on his desk. It reminded him of the green plastic soldiers his boys played with, but it was a bit larger, and brightly colored. “This is an astronaut.”
“A what?”
“That is what we will be calling people who go into space. Look. The helmet comes off.”
“Isn’t that … a girl? Is she … colored?”
“Oh, yes. We will have girls, boys, black, white, and in between.”
“Well, I don’t know…”
“This is a space capsule. See how the door opens?” She popped one of the tiny figures inside. “And this is a launchpad. You operate it with a rubber band—like so.” A tiny rocket, with the capsule snapped onto the top, flew across the room. She walked over, stooped with fascinating grace, and picked it up. “The capsule separates from the rocket as soon as it gets into space. Oh, here are some cards—you get one in each box of cereal—that give facts. Like, ‘Where does space start, anyway?’”
“I don’t know.”
“Sixty-two miles, or one hundred kilometers, above the Earth.” She handed him the rocket and space capsule. “Just pop that off—that’s right. Kind of fun, isn’t it? Kids will love it. Their parents will have to buy a lot of cereal to complete the set—which we plan will continually grow in size.” She opened another small plastic box. “Here are some components of the planned moon colony. President Kennedy mentioned one in his last speech.”
“Yes, yes.” He pointed. “What’s that there?”
After fifteen minutes of examining the toys and putting them through their paces, he had assembled, with Bette’s help, a moon colony complete with twenty different astronauts and scientists. Finally he looked up. “And how many different toys?”
“Fifty.”
“That’s a lot of cereal.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m interested. What do I do?”
Bette took a contract from her briefcase. “Sign here.”
“I’ll have our lawyers look this over.”
“Of course. You can get in touch with me at our office. Here’s the number.”
“This is an exclusive, correct?”
“Of course. It’s all in the contract.”
* * *
It was late afternoon when Bette walked out into downtown Battle Creek, and the sky was darkening. An icy wind blew a curtain of snow down Main Street. The sidewalks and street were narrow corridors bounded by mountains of plowed-up snow.
Another step completed. She had appointments with the other big cereal manufacturers, and had slightly varying lines of toys for each of the big cereal manufacturers—different colors, different designs. She’d hired a woman, back in Virginia, to answer the phone number she’d given and take messages.
Her black Mercury Comet station wagon was parked on the next block, and she managed to keep her composure until she flung her briefcase into the backseat and slid into the front seat. She slammed the door and leaned her forehead against the steering wheel.
Bette had at least realized why Hadntz did not seem to age in a normal way. She ping-ponged around in time. Whatever that meant. Whatever time was. Bette had experienced that, now, and it was simply sad, and wrenching.
She wondered where—or, to put it differently, when, Hadntz was now. Certainly, she would meet Hadntz again, and she didn’t know what the good doctor’s intentions would be, at that point. They were ever changing, based on a much wider palette of possibilities than Bette’s.
Bette’s intentions, on the other hand, were absolutely clear. The essential agents in Hadntz’s Device, which fostered altruism, were also in the cereal toys she had just sold to General Mills. These agents were transmittable, through touch, and through the very air. They formed networks, which would grow. Their molecular design came from another time line, one in which engineering had accomplished molecular replication. Should one be cut in two, each would regenerate a complete figure. This practically guaranteed worldwide distribution in a short period of time. She had no idea how long it would take to generate any real results. It could be decades. It was just another prototype spawned by the Device, another vector.
Bette was doing the only thing she knew to do, at this point—continuing the evolution of humanity through distribution of the Device, in the form of a very attractive children’s toy, to be used when they were going through their very precise intervals of sensitivity to various stimuli, their brains categorizing, organizing, linking.
She had made it back from time-fractured Dallas to her family’s timestream, fighting with the plane’s programming all the way. She stashed her timestreaming plane, which she supposed broke the time barrier, rather than the sound barrier, in a barn in Woodbridge, Virginia, which was on a thirty-acre property with a long stretch of flat ground: an airstrip. She bought the property instantly, meeting the owner’s asking price without haggling, and gave the county property tax assessors a way to access an account she set up, explaining that she would probably be overseas for several years.
It had taken her two weeks to recover, in an old motel on Route 460 near Pearisburg, in southwest Virginia, which had a view of a mountain called Angel’s Rest. She climbed Angel’s Rest twice that week, feeling as far from angelic as possible, since she had recently killed two men. They were not the first she had killed in her long career as a spy, but she had decided that they were the last.
Now, she could play out her plan. She had plenty of financial resources. Money dropped into the lap of spies, as it had hers, throughout the forties, fifties, and sixties. She had carried hers with her, in the form of diamonds, across timestreams, and much of it was now in Switzerland. Within weeks, she would be able to produce millions of the space dolls for cereal companies, all of them imbued with Hadntz material, which would radiate and link with one another, continuing that mysterious, ever-evolving brain-changing process Hadntz had created. Money from the cereal companies would go back into the shipping process, which would be mostly automatic. Any excess would go to the development of teacher-training centers in remote regions of the world. Someday there might be a generation that removed the obscene profit war brought to so many people, who might be able to throw a rod into the civilization-crushing gears of war.
She had not been able to come to terms with her personal situation, though. At first, she had been jubilant, euphoric. Sam. Jill. Brian. Megan. They were here. She had made her way back.
She was afraid to contact them, badly frightened by finding herself in a world where they did not exist. She didn’t want that to happen again. That was not the main problem, though.
She was now a very obvious target to those who had passed, with memories intact, from the Kennedy assassination time line to this. She’d thoroughly blown her cover. The CIA knew where she lived, though she’d been officially out of the game for years. They also might know their long-held suspicions were true: that Bette knew about the legendary, shadowy device they’d been after since the end of the war, certain it would give the nation, or whoever held it, even more power than the atomic bomb. How had this all started?
* * *
On November 8, 1938, Bette Elegante was in the Staatsoper, the Vienna State Opera House, in a particular seat, as instructed. At least, the strange note she had received contained a very strong hint to be here.
She disliked Vienna. Yes, it was a beautiful and cultured city, with narrow, winding streets bounded by neatly kept shops. The Ringstrasse, a broad avenue encompassing the inner city, was cosmopolitan and seemingly inviting.
But the huge swastika flags draped from balconies and in parks revolted her. Germany had annexed Austria in March, threatening to send in troops if the Austrian chancellor did not agree to the takeover. He had welcomed the Fascists, with open arms and a celebration, and the city was now a muted shadow of its former self.
Bette still did not know why she was here. So she was annoyed with herself when the jasmine-perfumed woman who had been sitting next to her the entire time said, “Come,” as the orchestra swelled for a finale, which Bette was pleased to escape.
The woman did not speak as Bette followed her through the opulent gallery and into the smoke-filled night, and grabbed her arm and pulled her back as a mob of people ran past wielding sticks and clubs.
“What’s going on?” asked Bette, in German.
The woman didn’t reply, just nodded at Bette to follow the mob at a safe distance, and set off.
She was about five feet three inches tall, and wore a tight, fashionable red dress and an ocelot coat that flared out behind her as she strode along. A broad-brimmed red hat swept aslant her face, preventing Bette from reading the expression in her eyes, but enhancing the intensity of her red lipstick.
“Who are you?” asked Bette, in German.
“My name is Eliani Hadntz.” She spoke in strongly accented, oddly stilted English.
“Who sent you?”
“No one. I asked for you.”
“Again.”
“The code name you so quaintly ask for is Amarin Konisky.”
“I don’t make the rules.”
“Perhaps someday you will. In the meantime, you should learn to trust your judgment. I am not any part of your organization. I got that password through subterfuge.”
“Why?” asked Bette, and stopped walking.
Hadntz wheeled around to face her. “By the end of this night, I might tell you.”
“Fine.” They resumed walking. This woman was not exactly a spy. She wanted to strike some kind of deal, for reasons unknown to Bette. Okay. That was her job: to gather information.
Hadntz took her arm and steered her down a side street, staying half a block behind the shouting men. The leader pointed to a shop front, and those behind him rushed forward, smashed the window, and swarmed inside. Books flew out the window. One shadowed man sprinkled gasoline on them from a large can and tossed a match; the books caught fire with a vroomp!, followed by hoarse shouts of approval.
Part of the crowd circled a man who reached into a flour sack and withdrew something. The circle broke with applause, and the man with the bag threw a rope over the bookseller’s sign and hoisted a collection of rags so that it swung above the street. It vaguely resembled a human being, as it had a rag-stuffed sphere where the head should be. A large sign hung below the sphere: MARIA MONTESSORI. The effigy, once lit, flamed up and further illuminated the mob.
“Maria Montessori?” asked Bette. “I don’t understand.”
“You visited one of her many schools in Vienna, as I suggested?”
“That note was from you?”
“Yes. Did you?”
“I did.”
“And what was your impression?”
As she watched the terrible blaze in the alley grow stronger, and devour the chairs and shelves shoved out of the shop through the broken window, Bette said to Hadntz, “I was surprised that such young children were reading, writing, and doing mathematics. But who is Montessori?”
Hadntz said, “An educator. She has given us a stunning revelation of human possibilities. We know very little about our own potential as humans. What you saw the children doing should not seem amazing, because it is very normal. What else could we be doing, if we were not wasting our time with the other nonsense, like wars, that being human seems to require? It appears that the developing child passes through discrete stages, during which she focuses deeply on learning about one facet of the environment, then moves on. Perhaps the whole of humanity is going through a larger stage of learning about our environment, as a whole, as one organism. For thousands of years, we have been learning about conflict. Perhaps we are ready to move to the next stage.”
Tendrils of Eliani Hadntz’s hair, black and curly and wild, surrounded her strong-featured face, half-shadowed by a streetlight. Her eyes, too, were black, and Hadntz’s gaze was commanding, yet calm. Her low tones had an impact that wakened something in Bette, showed her a tantalizing glimpse of a path both radical and revolutionary, one she had never before considered.
They walked through darkened, narrow streets lined with stone and brick buildings, through which roamed many more packs of riotous men, some in suits, some in Nazi uniform. Bette passed one side street, then backed up to get a better look.
A group of men, shouting “Juden!” had backed one man against the brick wall of a town house. The beleaguered man raised his fist. One assailant darted from the crowd, grabbed both of his arms, and held him against the wall. Another moved in and battered the victim’s face and abdomen. His groans, and the dull thud of the punches, sounded clearly, along with the jeers that followed each blow.
Bette ran down the alley, the clip of her heels like shots from a pistol. Hadntz followed, shouting, “No!”
Bette edged along the building, working her way in front of the jeering men. She pulled her revolver from her purse, widened her stance, and held it with both hands on his assailant. “Stop!” Bette cocked her revolver, which sounded a deep, threatening metallic snick. “Leave! Now!”
The attacker got in one last punch to the man’s kidney, glared at Bette, turned, and walked away. One of his cohorts spat on the man’s face. Bette kept her gun trained on them until they turned the corner, then slipped it into her coat pocket.
The shop owner’s white shirt shone, slick with blood, as he slumped to the pavement and vomited.
A woman, her face pale, opened the door, glanced at Bette and Hadntz, and helped the man to his feet. “Thank you. I—didn’t know what to do.” Her voice was hoarse. Tears started from her eyes, and she let them flow. Her teeth chattered. Hadntz picked up the man’s ruined jacket from the street and wrapped it around the woman.
The man spat out a tooth. “Do you believe me now?” he asked his wife. He put one hand on his nose.
Hadntz said, “Please. I am a doctor.” She examined his nose, put one arm on the small of his back to steady him, and pushed on his abdomen here and there. “Your nose is not broken. You may have internal injuries, though.”
“Dr. Isaak will come,” said the woman.
“There’s no time for that. You must leave this minute,” said Hadntz. “Before they return. Take only what is absolutely necessary.” She gave him a small card. “Please get in touch with me if you have difficulty. Go to this address, show the woman there this card, and she will shelter you, get him medical care, and help you with the necessary documents.”
“We have visas,” said his wife. “For the whole family.” She sighed. “My grandfather started this store. I didn’t want to leave. It’s not right.” She helped her husband into the stairway. Bette heard her shoot the bolt.
Hadntz said, “You took a great chance.”
“Not really. They were obviously a bunch of cowards. Ten against one. I was sure they would run.”
“And you do look like Hitler’s own avenging Aryan goddess, with your blond hair. That probably confused them.” They moved quickly down the now-dark street, the click of their heels mingling with the distant pop-pop of random gunfire and the high notes of glass as shards hit the pavement.
A German officer ran from around a corner a hundred feet from them and stopped when he saw them, holding his pistol aloft. “Halt!” he shouted. He lowered his pistol and took aim at them from a hundred feet away. One of the men from the mob Bette had run off stood behind him, pointing and shouting.
Bette drew her pistol from her coat pocket and shot the officer in the leg. He collapsed onto the cobblestones, screaming. The other man disappeared into the alley.
Bette grabbed Hadntz’s arm and pulled her across the street, down another alley, a map springing instantly to mind. A storage shed, full of old junk not worth locking up, was around a corner—this one!—she pushed open the door and dragged Hadntz in behind her; shut the door and waited as they crouched in what might have been a stall. Distant running footsteps of men who may have been looking for them or randomly hunting for new victims. After a few minutes, Bette said, “Let’s go.”
When, after twenty minutes of an angling course they emerged from a network of tiny streets onto a boulevard, Bette said, “I think we’re safe.”
Smoke billowed down the street, and looters dashed from shop to shop in anarchic disarray, boots pounding on bricks, shouting with rough voices and wielding bats, hammers, and crowbars. They moved through the chaos in their theater finery, unmolested, almost as if they were invisible.
“You are a cool one,” said Hadntz.
“Reflex. Training. I haven’t seen anything quite this bad before,” said Bette. “Just a lot of threats and intimidation and firings. Not any direct violence.”
“This is Goering’s test. He’s been planning it for some time. All over Germany and Austria, a few men are to deliberately begin the attacks. As you see, others are not reluctant to join in.”
“It’s a test? Do I understand correctly?”
“To see how the public reacts to the outright, public humiliation of Jews and the destruction and theft of their businesses. Obviously, Goering will be pleased with the results of his test, at least here. Already, of course, Jews have been thrown out of academic positions and jobs in Germany, but many here hoped that Vienna might remain safe.”
“How do you know this about Goering?”
“You need to ask yourself why you did not know why it was going to happen tonight. Your intelligence network is useless.”
A blast of heat and noise met them as they rounded a corner.
Across a square, a synagogue door stood open. The synagogue’s arched roof collapsed, timbers groaning, and the flames licked overhanging trees. The stained-glass windows of the still-standing walls were lit from within; two were broken, and conflagration surged outward, blackening what remained of the building. Outside, a band of children cheered at the collapse and hurled rocks at the remaining windows.
“Do you want to know why people do such things?” asked Hadntz.
“I’m not sure I want to,” said Bette.
“You need to know. Because you, or I, or anyone, could do such things. This way of seeing other groups is what human history is built on. A seemingly endless round of hideous barbarity. I believe it has something to do with brain chemistry.”
“Brain chemistry? What do you mean by that?”
“We are simply exquisitely imprintable.”
“Imprintable?” Just then a German soldier approached.
“Papers.” He held out his hand.
Bette, thankful that her gun was now in her pocket, took them from her purse.
He perused them. “Berlin!” He looked up, smiling. “My mother lives there.”
Using her flawless Berlin accent, Bette chatted with him about the Berlin neighborhood where his mother lived. When Hadntz produced her papers, he frowned, then looked at her with suspicion. “A professor?” He shook his head and handed them back.
To Bette, he said, “You are staying at the Imperial? You must return to your hotel immediately. It is not safe to be out this night.” He pointed. “Ringstrasse is that way. When you get there, turn left.”
He glared at Hadntz. “And you, Doktor Doktor Hadntz. Go back to Hungary.”
As they walked toward Ringstrasse, Bette said, “Doktor Doktor?”
“Germans give you the titular benefit of all of your doctorates. They like titles.”
“No intellectuals wanted here.”
Hadntz snorted. “I grew up in Vienna, unlike that German soldier. I went to school here. He, and all of these Germans, are a foreign army occupying my country.”
They walked quickly, and finally caught sight of the Imperial, one of Vienna’s finest hotels, blazing not with fire but with light. Several black sedans idled in front of the hotel. The doorman admitted them, nodding at Bette. In the posh lobby, two men chatted over brandy. “That is Himmler, head of—”
“The SS,” Bette finished. “He checked in three days ago. He prefers beer with his caviar. I attended a party he gave last night.”
“And you heard nothing of their plans? What a waste of time.”
Bette’s room was on the third floor. After looking up and down the empty hallway, Bette unlocked her door. The wall sconce was dim, and served only to keep them from tripping over furniture as the two women crossed to the French doors and looked out over the city, where orange tongues of fire flared, block after block, in wanton destruction that was a complete contrast to the safe, luxurious refuge room from which they watched.
“Dulles certainly knows how to spend money,” Hadntz said after a moment, turning to survey the shadowed, but obviously elegant, room.
“I’m an heiress from Berlin.”
Hadntz opened the French doors, stepped onto the narrow balcony, and stood in silence, gripping the railing. Bette saw tears, and anger, in her dark eyes, caught in the light from the sconce when she turned.
“You are young,” she said. “But I think you’ll do.”
“I always have,” said Bette. Now it was her turn to use an ironic tone.
Hadntz stepped back inside, closed and locked the doors, and drew the drapes. “Turn on the lights.” She removed her hat and put it on a mahogany side table next to an art deco lamp, and then undid her hair. She sat on the teal-colored silk couch and began to unbuckle one of her high heels. Her hair fell across her face like a veil as she spoke. “There are many things that I must tell you, Miss Elegante. I will be here all night.” She shrugged off her coat and crossed her stockinged feet on the coffee table in front of her. “We will need dinner, and several of their best bottles of wine.”
Bette picked up the phone and ordered grilled fish for both of them, a pot of coffee, and specified the wines, two German, and two French. She also ordered a bottle of Scotch and four packs of Fatima cigarettes.
All of those were useful, that night, while Dr. Eliani Hadntz educated Bette about neurochemistry, quantum physics, research into human violence, and genetics.
Bette realized, much later, that some of the information that Dr. Hadntz had used to develop the device she claimed would end war, had come from other, future, timestreams.
But at this point, Hadntz was still working on her device. It was not ready. She simply wanted to prepare Bette.
Eliani Hadntz had a quiet, yet forceful and convincing manner. She drew diagrams on hotel stationery, and Bette soon called for a ream of paper. If Bette did not understand, Hadntz moved back, step by step, until she arrived at a common point of departure. Bette’s education had been eclectic, beginning at a state school in Michigan, continuing at Duke, and finishing at Cambridge. She had usually been the only woman in the largely technical and scientific classes she had taken, and had some background in the areas feeding into Hadntz’s many-threaded device, but much that the woman talked about was completely new to Bette, and she suspected that it was known only by highly specialized chemists, physicists, and biologists—and that, moreover, few of them knew what the others knew. Hadntz also gave Bette stunning news: Lise Meitner, a physicist who had lately fled Nazi Germany in fear of her life, had just confirmed the possibility of atomic fission: an atomic bomb was possible.
Hadntz had a different chain reaction, one of empathy and altruism, in mind. And she had hard physical plans to create the initial device, which would then replicate and go on to change the baseline of humans from one of constant war to one of constant peace, productivity, and intellectual expansion.
She left, just before dawn, taking all the papers with her. She told Bette that, for her own safety, but, much more important, for the sake of the Device, that she would probably not have much direct contact with her in the future. But she planned to make use of Bette, who agreed to be on call. Hadntz was setting up a network, trying to think about all possibilities that might arise, including her own death.
Bette stood on her private balcony at the Imperial, bundled against the cold in her opera coat, drinking bitter coffee. Smoke from burnt Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues blotted out the sunrise. Its acrid smell, and a small whirlwind of burnt debris swirling down Ringstrasse, presaged a deeper, more universal destruction, a flame that might spread from the sickness in Germany, which had now overtaken Austria, and engulf the world. Bette knew it. Everyone knew it. Yet all the world’s leaders wanted to deny its imminence. Churchill, alone and ridiculed, had been sounding the alarm.
Bette brooded, realizing the truth of Hadntz’s predictions, which seemed like unavoidable consequences, given what she knew, and far from mystical. Yet somehow, Hadntz reminded Bette of the figure of Blind Justice: one weight pan freighted with the awful density of humanity’s murderous history, the other with her brilliant, probably impossible, Device.
After her night of coffee, cigarettes, whiskey, and extreme ideas rendered as scientifically achievable, two opposing ideas thrust themselves forward.
One was the convoluted hate-riven atrocity titled Mein Kampf, through which she had slogged, trying to get a clue about what drove Hitler’s murky thought process. It had filled her mind with a Frankensteinian monster much more horrible than Shelley’s original vision.
The other was a poem by the Irish mystic, AE:
Out of a timeless world
Shadows fall upon time,
From a brightness older than Earth:
A shadow the soul may climb.
I climb by the timeless stair
To a brightness older than time.
If Hadntz’s Device was actually created, and if it worked, then beyond the destroyed city she surveyed from the balcony she could almost glimpse, in the ideas Hadntz put forth with such certainty, a timeless stair, shimmering beyond sight, which just might surmount these deep and fearful shadows. Hers was a stair built to the highest standards of what humanity might possibly achieve, designed by a strange architect who had imbibed of a mixture of astounding knowledge, to synergistic effect.
Exhaustion blotted out Bette’s image, so that all she saw now, looking down on the Ringstrasse, were shards of shattered glass dull beneath a heavy sky, reflecting emptiness: The ruins of civilization as she, and many others, knew it.
* * *
At the end of September 1946, Bette took a train to Berga, a small town in occupied East Germany. That was the day she decided to go home.
She wore a Party uniform—a well-worn skirt, a white blouse, and a jacket with Party insignia. She had a good number of forged papers with her in a flat leather bag worn over her shoulder. Bureaucracies loved documentation.
It had been a long war. She had shepherded the development of Hadntz’s Device throughout. She had been a superlative spy.
She had fallen in love with Sam Dance.
She had set love aside, because, although countries had surrendered and treaties had been signed, the war continued. There was no shooting, not right now, not with atomic bombs on the table. But the war went on. She had been working as a double agent in the Soviet Union for a year. Today, she was collecting evidence for German prisoner-of-war atrocities that were coming up for trial.
Hours later, in a cemetery filled with dead prisoners of war, she leaned against a linden tree and sank to the ground.
She had been on a similar grassy hillside, covered with wildflowers, a few days ago, where she had walked past the new grave of a cousin on her mother’s side. The cousin had been a Russian tank commander in the war, and then the Soviets shot her for some reason or other; it never mattered what for or why to them. Because Bette was a spy, she had to pretend that she had no idea who the new grave was for. She had, by now, spent almost ten years in Europe, the last few months in the bitter atmosphere of Stalingrad.
And then, there was Eliani Hadntz. Bette had ignored several of her attempts at communicating, just as she had ignored queries from her superiors about Hadntz, the Device, and Sam.
As she sat there, looking out across the bucolic-looking village where so many horrors had taken place, she thought about Hadntz’s Device and all her crazy claims for the way it would change humanity for the better.
Oh, yes, Dance and his buddy Wink had had some success with it, in their little shop in Gladbach. So much success—what was it, a burst of light or energy or something?—that Bette had actually entertained some hope for the past year.
Silly of her, eh?
She burst out laughing, then cried, then laughed some more until she gasped for breath. How absurd to think that a mere invention, no matter how complex, could change such overwhelming evil. Brutality welled from the ground from here to the Middle East; the very soil was made of human bones. She had probably walked over the unmarked graves of millions of dead since she had arrived. What made Eliani Hadntz think that she could change anything?
The vast history of this millennium-long crush of humanity on the landmass of Europe was, suddenly, deeply overwhelming. She thought of Sam, and, surprising herself, veered into a mood that was alien to her. Sam, or her own surviving brothers, could have been buried here, right here where she sat. The Americans brought here had landed in Le Havre only a few weeks earlier. They had no idea that all the territory Germany claimed was full of death camps, or that they might end up in one of them.
How could anything but more violence and revenge, come from this? What would unwind in the future—if not here, then elsewhere in the world, forever? Could anything ever change? The same extremes of human behavior manifested in the Third Reich now ran through the Soviet Union, an unending plague.
She shook a handkerchief from her pocket, blew her nose and mopped at her face. Then she lit a cigarette, stood, and brushed off her skirt. It was late afternoon. She had intended to stay the night in this wretched town, but she just couldn’t stand to be here a minute more. Not in East Germany, not in Leningrad, not in France. Not in Europe at all.
She had to get home.
* * *