Free In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan

Outside, the dim winter dawn brightened, causing the piece of metal to gleam.
    “This is a resonant cavity magnetron.” Made of copper, the disk was about the size of a grandfather-clock pendulum. “It generates ten kilowatts of power and ten-centimeter radio waves.”
    “So far we’ve been using—what?—about two meters?” asked Wink.
    “Correct. Two meters works for vague, general imaging, but this has made much more accurate targeting possible. With this, even a U-boat periscope can be spotted.”
    “Amazing,” said Wink. “And am I right in assuming that this opens us up to much shorter antennas?”
    “That can be installed on bombers, yes.”
    Sam did not say anything. He was stunned by how similar this magnetron was to the one described by Hadntz as a power source for her device, at least in output. It had been one reason he had begun to think it was just a fairy tale. He believed there was no such device.
    Now there was. Sam picked it up and examined it.
    Bitts gave them detailed information about how it worked; about how electrons were tunneled around its circular core by a magnet. He told them, briefly, about another component of the M-9 system: the proximity fuse. Merle Tuve, a Carnegie-based physicist who bought his own black powder at a Georgetown shop and made his own vacuum tubes, had developed it. The prototype had recently been tested at the firing range in Dahlgren, Virginia. The fuse, which had a radio-controlled detonator, sent a spark when it was near a target, rather than when it hit a target. It was a technological development that might help turn the tide of the war against Germany and in the Pacific. Bitts said that the new computer-and-radar system was called the Signal Corps Radar 584, SCR-584 for short.
    And, reflected Sam, it had all been foreshadowed by what he had learned from Hadntz’s papers after that night in December. But this stuff was way, way back in the beginning of the paper. If this was possible, then—
    A thought struck him. “If they’d had this radio detection system at Pearl Harbor—”
    “They did,” said Bitts.
    “ What ?”
    “Not this, but they had a long-wave radio imaging station that had just been set up and had not yet been tested for acceptance. It was only on at night. The operator had a trainee with him, and stayed over about ten minutes that morning. They saw blips on the screen and called it in. The plotters had just gone off-shift; the guy who answered the phone said that it must be regularly scheduled B-17’s coming in from the mainland. Nobody expected the Japanese to attack.”
    Sam pushed back his chair. “Excuse me.” He brushed past the guard and found a bathroom down the hall.
    Inside, he locked the door, leaned against the cold tile wall, and vomited.
    As he splashed water on his face, the cold light of winter dawn washed through a high window. He put both hands on the sink, leaned forward, and bowed his head. Thousands of men had died. Hundreds were entombed in the ocean, like Keenan, or had been burned beyond recognition in the tremendous fires set off by the Japanese attack.
    Just having technology wasn’t enough. It had to be used.
    How many Keenans might be saved, if Hadntz’s ideas, whatever they might lead to, actually worked?
    Did time have a shape, as Hadntz suggested? Was it as malleable as music, demanding certain basics but open to improvisation?
    The idea opened new doors, turning him mercifully away from his previous obsessive thoughts.
    Sam sat on the wooden chair beneath the window and watched the tiny octagonal tiles on the floor form various patterns, depending on—what? Something his brain was doing, suggesting different ways of seeing. Maybe time was a pattern which one chose to see, out of several possible patterns. Perhaps one’s genetic material—the DNA, which Hadntz claimed was malleable—determined the pattern one saw. Perhaps time was a series of tones—frequencies that humans interpreted and might