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someone, some target for his profound loneliness, as if Keenan had been his twin. He tried not to hope that the strange papers he’d been given might open a history in which he could see his brother again. But some future Keenan was the one he kept in mind as his audience.
    Writing his narratives was a way of keeping Keenan alive in his own mind. You are still there — somewhere . And there was also the feeling that Sam had to live more fully, absorb every detail with enough appreciation for two, because he was fortunate enough to still live, because his eyes were still filled with color, his ears with sound, his mind with thoughts.
    This was my war, he would tell his brother. This is what I did to defeat our enemies, to take the world through the war, past the war, and then to continue the fight. This is what I saw and what I learned.
    We were somewhat surprised to get Christmas Day off after turkey and dressing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and nuts. (I believe there is an Act of Congress designating Thanksgiving and Christmas Day menus for the armed forces; I hear they even have holiday K-rations for foxholes.) After dinner we had a home-talent “entertainment”; some singing with mimeographed song sheets, and our company magician, Joe Kocab. We were released in the early afternoon.
    I wound up with Jimmy “The Mess” Messner, Kocab, Stan Slates, Bill Porter, and others; we got cabs to a local roadhouse jammed with mostly rookie soldiers and local denizens. Kocab, Slates, and I were sitting in a booth with a slight buzz on when a drunken soldier staggered by.
    Kocab said, “Hey, buddy, get me a beer!”
    Instead of telling Joe to go f———himself, the drunk said, “You’ll have to give me a dime.”
    Kocab said, “Sure,” and took his hand, laid a dime on his palm, and folded his fingers over it.
    The drunk staggered a few steps, looked in his palm, and came stomping back, irritated, shouting, “I said you have to give me a dime!”
    Kocab said, “I’ll give you another dime, but you have to take care of it.” Again he took the drunk’s hand, put the same dime in it, and folded his hand shut. The drunk immediately opened his hand, looked in it, and shouted, “Give me my money!”
    All of this was entertaining Kocab immensely, but the soldier was too drunk and too irritated to realize how the money was “disappearing,” and by this time his drunken buddies were showing up to defend their buddy against the world, and our buddies were showing up to defend us, and the rest of the customers moving in to find somebody who looked like he had a target painted on his jaw.
    Slates and I were trying to move our contingent toward the door; by the time we moved two or three outside, the others were edging back into the hot zone. This went on for some time before we got all our crowd loaded and moving to another roadhouse.
    But something else is happening too, something just as momentous. I’m still trying to understand. I wish I could explain it to you.
    Just before I left for the Army, Jack Armstrong—you remember him, Fred’s brother—and I were discussing an idea he had about bouncing radio waves off airplanes to see where they were. My argument was you were bouncing waves off a cylindrical body, so there was damned little echo. And that they would be so scattered in space that you wouldn’t get an echo to give you a blip.
    Nothing wrong with the concept—we need amp; that is, power. Concentrated power that is just not available. What I’m working on has something to do with that idea, but it’s infinitely more complicated.
    Anyway, a better life is nearer than I thought. I’ve only been here two weeks, and now I’m off to Aberdeen Proving Grounds for a course in generator maintenance.
    Or so they tell me.
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Aberdeen Proving Grounds
February 1942
    T HE ABERDEEN PROVING GROUNDS were a warren of barracks and classrooms. The Aberdeen Back-and-Forth, an ancient train of wooden cars with time-smoothed