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about how life changes matter— we are matter talking and thinking—and use those discoveries in a technological fashion, to improve humanity. To end human suffering. Something organic—live—presupposes a seed, a germ that contains the genetic program of the entire organism. Life unfolds according to time, in a rhythm.
    He put the paper down. If he could he insert the seed that might change this present, where would he do it? Here …or here ? How would he know? What havoc might he reap, what lives might he shatter? Where, in these papers, did she consider this?
    Yet—he would do it. He would swing out now, on the end of the rope, unafraid, and arc through the hot summer day, or through suddenly fractured history, where death reached in without notice, snatching loved ones—if he only knew how.
    His head dropped onto the desk, but he battled sleep, fearing nightmares, while listening to the radio for any scrap of news about what might be happening to Keenan Dance.
    But as the radio poured news of fire and explosions into his ears, he dreamed of bright childhood, the glinting river, the cornfields of Ohio, where Keenan ran, parting the great, tall rows, toward the Puzzle River.
    The next morning, he was pulled out of class, this week with a plump, bald German refugee, and taken to a small room in the basement. He was seated on a chair while two men in suits sat on a desk like mirrors of each other, both with one leg on the floor, and asked him questions about Hadntz’s visit and demanded to know about their affair and where she had gone. A blond woman, a Major Elegante, was also there, taking notes, sitting on a chair in one corner, but she didn’t speak and barely glanced at Sam.
    “Well,” he said, “it just happened very quickly. I can’t explain it.” He held up his palms in question. “Who knows what love is, how it happens?”
    “Love!” One of the men actually snorted.
    “You don’t think she could love me?” he asked. “Why not?”
    “I think we’re getting sidetracked,” said Suit Number Two.
    “She is a very beautiful woman,” said Sam. “It wouldn’t be proper for me to say much more about it. You say she’s gone?” He slumped back into his chair, shook his head. “After all that. How could she just leave?” He looked at them sharply. “Maybe something’s happened to her. She must have had some kind of accident. Maybe she’s in trouble. Are you looking into it? I didn’t do anything to her. I mean—”
    “Look,” said Number One. “Just let us know if she gets in touch, okay?”
    He was relieved when they did not question him further.
    He had already determined that, whatever the cost, however complicated, and no matter what the roadblocks, he would figure out Hadntz’s plans.
    And use them.
    The Washington, D.C., course in which Sam had been enrolled was abandoned: Every serviceman had to be a soldier now, first and foremost. And, Sam thought, perhaps the professors suddenly had a more urgent task. Or his contact with Dr. Hadntz was suspect, and he was to be trusted with no more secrets. In the fashion of the Army, they had of course not been told what the course was intended to do, but he was certain that he and his classmates now had more information about certain aspects of theoretical physics, codebreaking, and other classified information than most people in the Army.
    Whatever the reason, within a week he was on the train back to Camp Sutton, in North Carolina.
    On the way, he was given leave to go back to Middleburg, Ohio, for Keenan’s funeral. It was a disorienting slice of time from the past, with all the old neighbors, except that Keenan was absent.
    Even Keenan’s body was absent from Katzan’s Funeral Home on 5th Street, where his large family gathered.
    Keenan was permanently entombed in the USS Arizona .
3
Camp Sutton, North Carolina
January 1942
    B ACK AT CAMP SUTTON , Sam began to write his stories of the war down for Keenan. Or anyone, really, just