Read Online In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan - Free Book Online
Authors: Kathleen Ann Goonan
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combining two different scales to get new intervals. A new resolution. New chords.”
“Not necessarily played but, yeah, there . You hear them. They resonate .”
The way events that happened halfway around the world resonated here. Forming a fabric of meaning and being.
The way Pearl Harbor had set Sam on his strange course, which might yield a music as yet unhearable.
Sam sat through the first class of basic electricity, which lasted three weeks, and got perfect scores on every test. His notes were perplexing even to him, when he examined them later—a running record of how electrical theory, which he already knew backward and forward from his college years—fed into and supported Hadntz’s theories. Afterward, he had been advanced to the next class. Three weeks later, he was called to the CO’s office.
“I’ve just had a look at your records, Dance,” the CO said. “You’ve had three years of chemical engineering, and we’ve had you in Introductory Electricity, Part Two, for three weeks. You trying to waste the Army’s time?”
“No, sir.” Just trying to extend this warm, dry, passable-chow interlude as long as possible, and ferret out a place in mind and in a physical location to do his own work: to build the Hadntz Device, the HD.
The CO shuffled papers and found the one he wanted. “Part of your time in Washington is available only on a need-to-know basis.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“I need to know. What were you doing?”
“I suggest that you ask the Army. I’m not sure myself.”
He glowered. “Well, look, we’re putting you right on the M-9 lectures. Got people coming down from Bell Labs to lay it all out.”
“What’s the M-9?”
“Replaces the M-7. Classified.”
Sam had had training on the M-7 Director, a fire-laying assembly which required several men to work as a team in order to send a missile to hit a moving target. Each time it was fired, the team had to calculate the trajectory, and custom-cut the fuse. It was time-consuming and not very accurate. “I assumed that everything here was top secret.”
“Good. Dismissed. And Dance?”
Sam turned in the doorway.
“I suggest you get with the program.”
Sam refrained from laughing until he was outside.
The M-9, it turned out, was the result of research at MIT, Princeton, and Bell Labs—the work of the most brilliant minds available to the war effort. Their goal had been to develop an electronic calculating artillery director capable of much higher precision (plus or minus two yards at 40,000 feet) than the mechanical calculation produced by the M-7 Director.
The first lecture started after lunch.
“When an electrical current flows through wire in a coil it develops a magnetic field that changes direction at sixty cycles a second. The changing voltage pushes the rotor around.” The Bell Labs lecturer, Dr. Bitts, held up an object.
“This is a selsyn regulator. Of course, you guys all know what a selsyn is. Who’s going to tell me? You, Hellman?”
Silence.
“It’s a device that transmits the angular position in the generator to a motor.”
They filed out around six; the men headed toward the mess hall and Bitts headed in the other direction. As of one accord, Wink and Sam caught up with him.
“Buy you a beer?” asked Wink.
“I’ve got an hour to kill before my car gets here. Can you get into the officer’s canteen?”
“With you we can.”
They found an empty booth and ordered beer. “That was interesting,” said Sam.
“I’m just getting started.”
“I’ve been thinking about something for quite some time,” said Sam. “If you send out radio waves and bounce them off a target, you could get back information about direction and speed. But you’d need something with a lot of power to focus the signal. I don’t know how you’d overcome that problem. Could this M-9 have something to do with it? I mean, what’s powering it?”
Bitts looked at Sam, then at his watch. He slid
“Not necessarily played but, yeah, there . You hear them. They resonate .”
The way events that happened halfway around the world resonated here. Forming a fabric of meaning and being.
The way Pearl Harbor had set Sam on his strange course, which might yield a music as yet unhearable.
Sam sat through the first class of basic electricity, which lasted three weeks, and got perfect scores on every test. His notes were perplexing even to him, when he examined them later—a running record of how electrical theory, which he already knew backward and forward from his college years—fed into and supported Hadntz’s theories. Afterward, he had been advanced to the next class. Three weeks later, he was called to the CO’s office.
“I’ve just had a look at your records, Dance,” the CO said. “You’ve had three years of chemical engineering, and we’ve had you in Introductory Electricity, Part Two, for three weeks. You trying to waste the Army’s time?”
“No, sir.” Just trying to extend this warm, dry, passable-chow interlude as long as possible, and ferret out a place in mind and in a physical location to do his own work: to build the Hadntz Device, the HD.
The CO shuffled papers and found the one he wanted. “Part of your time in Washington is available only on a need-to-know basis.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“I need to know. What were you doing?”
“I suggest that you ask the Army. I’m not sure myself.”
He glowered. “Well, look, we’re putting you right on the M-9 lectures. Got people coming down from Bell Labs to lay it all out.”
“What’s the M-9?”
“Replaces the M-7. Classified.”
Sam had had training on the M-7 Director, a fire-laying assembly which required several men to work as a team in order to send a missile to hit a moving target. Each time it was fired, the team had to calculate the trajectory, and custom-cut the fuse. It was time-consuming and not very accurate. “I assumed that everything here was top secret.”
“Good. Dismissed. And Dance?”
Sam turned in the doorway.
“I suggest you get with the program.”
Sam refrained from laughing until he was outside.
The M-9, it turned out, was the result of research at MIT, Princeton, and Bell Labs—the work of the most brilliant minds available to the war effort. Their goal had been to develop an electronic calculating artillery director capable of much higher precision (plus or minus two yards at 40,000 feet) than the mechanical calculation produced by the M-7 Director.
The first lecture started after lunch.
“When an electrical current flows through wire in a coil it develops a magnetic field that changes direction at sixty cycles a second. The changing voltage pushes the rotor around.” The Bell Labs lecturer, Dr. Bitts, held up an object.
“This is a selsyn regulator. Of course, you guys all know what a selsyn is. Who’s going to tell me? You, Hellman?”
Silence.
“It’s a device that transmits the angular position in the generator to a motor.”
They filed out around six; the men headed toward the mess hall and Bitts headed in the other direction. As of one accord, Wink and Sam caught up with him.
“Buy you a beer?” asked Wink.
“I’ve got an hour to kill before my car gets here. Can you get into the officer’s canteen?”
“With you we can.”
They found an empty booth and ordered beer. “That was interesting,” said Sam.
“I’m just getting started.”
“I’ve been thinking about something for quite some time,” said Sam. “If you send out radio waves and bounce them off a target, you could get back information about direction and speed. But you’d need something with a lot of power to focus the signal. I don’t know how you’d overcome that problem. Could this M-9 have something to do with it? I mean, what’s powering it?”
Bitts looked at Sam, then at his watch. He slid
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