Free In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan Page A

eventually regulate with as much ease as electricity.
    He sat there, thinking, ranging through possibilities as if they each had an azimuth and elevation, and he had a mechanism that could focus on them and enable or disable them according to…again, what? How could one measure the ripples from a stone tossed in a pond, interacting with an infinite number of other tossed-stone ripples?
    He sat there till Wink came and fetched him.
5
The M-9
    O KAY, NOW LET ’ S make ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ modern. A-flat.” Wink counted out the time, and it was fast.
    It was midnight. Sam and Wink were in a deserted lounge building at Aberdeen.
    After as many visits to Minton’s and Monroe’s as possible, including Sunday afternoon jam sessions, they had discerned that the harmonic rules within modern music were dictated by tones themselves rather than an artificial framework—scales—most commonly used in Western music. Rhythm, the other main component, also followed no previous form, and the music swung of its own accord, off balance and falling toward resolutions adroitly avoided. They had chosen the most innocuous song they could think of, and it was now so modern, so abstract, that its roots could barely be discerned.
    Sam played a sixteen-bar solo, passed it to Wink, and they finished in a stretch meant to be in unison but that fell to pieces. They finished, breathless and laughing.
    “That was your fault,” said Sam, collapsing onto a worn couch.
    Wink wiped sweat from his forehead. “Not so. You’ve been slacking off.”
    Wink had had Sam practicing scales in different keys until it seemed as though his fingers would fall off. Some scales, given the arrangement of holes on the saxophone, seemed almost impossible to play quickly, but Sam rapidly improved.
    Wink filled at least part of the void left by Keenan’s death. He was immediate, and radiated something akin to Keenan’s relish for living to the full.
    Studying his notes for the frequent tests on the revolutionary new information they were absorbing required all of Sam’s mental energy, but he occasionally took out Hadntz’s paper and tried to understand it in the light of what he was learning. Security was tight in the shops in which they worked with the components of the M-9, but Sam used the experience to think about what might be usable, in his immediate environment, if the Army allowed him to continue on his present track, in creating a prototype.
    It seemed impossible, here at Aberdeen. There was no privacy. The shops were locked when not in use, and placed under armed guard. The M-9 and radar were top-secret.
    He would need his own shop, specialized tubes, and other materials which he would have to synthesize out of disparate components. Parts of the process were simply not included in the Hadntz paper. He would have to deduce those on his own.
    But…what if he was successful? What was Hadntz’s real purpose in recruiting him? What if something unimaginably new was born, as she hoped? It would change…everything.
    It’s just a form of technology, he told himself. An application of science, like the M-9. Science was neutral—merely information. Technologies were focused. Human intent determined their development and use.
    But human intent was what she proposed to manipulate. If an atomic bomb was possible, and it was in the works in Germany, wasn’t it his responsibility to do something?
    If the Hadntz Device worked, though…who had the moral authority even to use it?
    She talked about averaging, about the device being available to everyone, even children. The genetic triggers of their time-sense would be different. The plasticity of mind that enabled learning would be replicated at will, rather than disappearing at an early age. She cited work in child development by an Italian doctor that proved these learning abilities occurred in discrete stages, and that if one stage was missed, the child would not have the same chance to learn as