Free In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan Page B

easily as, say, they learned their own language at an early age. Hadntz’s paper ranged over a huge number of subjects, searching for a uniting theory that could then be used…but how?
    Playing bebop was so demanding that it diverted him from this obsessive conundrum, freed the part of his mind that needed that freedom in order to even begin to understand.
    “Hard work,” commented Sam.
    “Thinking is always hard work.”
    “Kind of like inventing radar.”
    “Yeah, but thinking about music is free. You need a lot of money to think about radar. Laboratories to test theories. Shops to create hardware.”
    “Big companies to produce the stuff.”
    “But it’s all just electronic pulses.”
    “Like music.”
    Wink nodded. “I seriously think that there is a connection. At least in the fact that human minds are involved in the production of highly disciplined pulses. What moves me in modern jazz is the same thing that moves me when I think about the M-9. Both are an astounding confluence of thought, attempts to make it new that suddenly come together and bear fruit. Sometimes it seems as if art and science are very closely related. Both make me feel like humans have been stumbling toward the light for centuries, and now the sun has risen. Like you have to keep finding out all kinds of things that don’t seem connected, and then someone will see how to unite them. There’s the art of it.” Wink tended to fall into such verbal reflection, and Sam found himself encouraging it; what Wink thought often reflected what he was thinking.
    Sam wondered, not for the first time, whether he should share Hadntz’s paper with Wink. He was cleared, security-wise, so the Army had solved that question for Sam. But Sam was still unsure.
    They got to New York almost every weekend. If they left directly after their class wrapped up, they could be in New York in time for a nice dinner and a fair amount of music.
    Hadntz’s ideas about the quantum nature of consciousness sometimes came to the fore as Sam sat in Minton’s listening to the concrete, seemingly isolated packets of information that made up modern jazz, strung together in a whole that made more sense the more he listened to it. And the more he heard, the more he craved, because it led his mind in one direction, a timeless one, bright, in direct counterpoint to the darkness that was now Europe and the Pacific. No one knew how the war would end. All of Europe might fall to Hitler, all of Asia to the Japanese. One, the other, or both, seemed equally likely. The reported brutality of these regimes made such futures, so very possible, seem unlivable. It was a tense time, charged with the immediacy of history in the making, the sense that everyone had to work very quickly, as hard as they could.
    Bebop released the place to which Sam directed his missives to Keenan, a “some-when” in which he still lived in the loops of time and space that Hadntz’s paper seemed to reveal, a place where he and Keenan might be different than they had been here, where they might not even have the same common memories they’d once had, and yet would somehow be, ineluctably, Keenan and Sam, like a tune that could be played an infinite number of ways and still retain its identity. Modern music was jazz, yes, but jazz assuredly made quite new, something so new and different that, when contrasted to previous musical forms, a new understanding of the nature of time would be.
    And modern music seemed to have some kind of relationship with the cutting-edge information about physics he’d received in Washington and in Aberdeen, and a relationship with the technological children of that information, the SCR-584 radar and the M-9 Director. With radar, the M-9 heard something that was previously ephemeral, just as these creators of modern jazz heard something that had always been there, but which could only be surmised with the mind and targeted with blindingly fast fingering, so swiftly that a new