“Fine,” the man says. “Give me one.”
“It’s that easy?” The man nods. “Okay.” And the man has Avery’s father’s face.
“Are you more comfortable now?” the man says.
“Tell me what you mean, ‘someone who knows.’”
“I mean that I didn’t exist until a particular thing had to be known. When I know what needs to be known, then I will no longer exist.”
Avery is catching on. “So you only exist as long as you don’t know what you need to know?”
The man with Avery’s father’s face nods.
“Tell me the story,” Avery says.
It is easy to be retired in the nineties, especially when you’ve had the career I did. You collect your retirement and your Social Security. You try to make day lilies grow on the Maine seacoast. You take morning hikes with your wife in Acadia National Park. If you get bored, you do consulting for people in the automotive industry.
I cannot get bored, because when I get bored I start thinking about Moe Berg, quarters, afternoons in July when my father would use a sick day and take me to ball games.
I have earned a lot of money from consulting work.
My wife’s name is Donna. She’s a little taller than I am, and a lot thinner, and her hair is exactly the color of a full moon high in a winter sky. We’ve been married for thirty-seven years, and I don’t think I know how to love another woman any more. She wants me to slow down a little, enjoy the golden years. She wants to know why I don’t want to go to Europe. We are happy together, and our children haven’t turned up on any talk shows to claim abuse or neglect.
I wish I could tell Donna why I don’t want to go to Europe, but I’ve hidden that away like an enemy autograph under the bill of a sweat-stained Detroit Tigers baseball cap.
Moe Berg died in New York in 1972, outliving my father by twenty-eight years. After his death, Donna and I went to New York for the first time.
“There is a scientist named Werner Heisenberg,” the man with Avery’s father’s face says.
“Is he German?” The man nods. “So we’ll be at war with him,” Avery says.
“Y es. Heisenberg is already very famous as a scientist, and when the war starts, he will work for the Nazis trying to split the atom and develop an atomic bomb. Here is the choice you must make: does Moe Berg kill this man Heisenberg or not?”
“Moe Berg kill somebody? He’s a baseball player.”
“Presently, yes. But when the war breaks out, he will join the Office of Strategic Services and act as a spy for the United States. One of his assignments, in 1944, will be to attend a lecture given by Heisenberg. Berg will have been instructed to shoot Heisenberg if he believes that the Nazis are nearly able to construct an atomic bomb.”
“You’re crazy,” Avery says. “I read about atomic bombs in Astounding. There’s no such thing.”
“There will be.”
Still dubious, Avery says, “Even if there is, what’s that got to do with my ball?”
“If Moe Berg hits another home run, he will play more often this season. Being a little old for the Army, he will play next season as well, and the OSS will hire someone in his place. The man that they hire and send to Heisenberg’s lecture will kill Heisenberg.”
“Big deal,” Avery says. “If there is such a thing as an atomic bomb, we sure don’t want Hitler to have it.”
“But what if killing Heisenberg has no influence on the Nazis’ ability to build an atomic bomb before the United States does? Then a brilliant scientist will have been assassinated for no gain.” Avery doesn’t say anything, and the man continues. “If Heisenberg’s assassination is successful, other German physicists will be targeted. The result of this will be that the men who would have built America’s space program will either be dead or frightened into going to Russia when the war ends.”
“Space program?” Avery is suddenly excited. He’s just read H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon a month ago, and if atomic bombs, why not men on the moon? “Are we going to the moon?” His mind fills with images of sleek, silvery rockets, blasting off into space. With him aboard. He will be an astronaut.
“That depends, Avery. There are many possibilities, but this much is certain: if Heisenberg is killed, the people who first set foot on the moon will not be American. And perhaps no one will at all.”
Avery is silent, staring at the floor that isn’t quite a floor. More like a lot of different floors, each of which is almost there but not quite. “How do you know all this?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Before you arrived here, I didn’t exist. When you leave, I won’t exist. But as long as this particular uncertainty persists, so do I.”
“Does it matter who lands on the moon?” Avery asks.
“Perhaps not. But it might matter very much who has the first atomic bomb.”
Avery watches the quarter spinning. If he moves a bit to one side or the other, he can make it look like the man with his father’s face has quarters for eyes. A Moe Berg home-run ball; something to tell the guys about. He thinks.
“Okay,” Avery says after a while. “You can have the ball.”
Sometimes the moon looks like a coin, its endless maria spreading their eagle wings across the landscape. On summer nights I wait for it to rise above the distortion near the horizon, and then I sit up late thinking that the moon spins just like that quarter did. Full, gibbous, half, fingernail, new. After a summer of late nights I have a time-lapse movie in my head, and sometimes when I dream the man with my father’s face has moons for eyes. They flicker like film that isn’t moving quite fast enough to fool the eye.
Heads or tails. Fifty-fifty. Position or velocity. The cat is alive, the cat is dead. But if you flip a coin ten times, you don’t often get five of each. I flip coins a lot, especially when it’s summer and I’m up late and there’s a fingernail moon.
Werner Heisenberg: Nazi or good citizen doing what he thought was right? Fifty-fifty. Most of his biographers and all of his friends say that he was simply a German, and when his country was at war he was duty-bound to build them an atomic pile. I wonder sometimes how much thought he gave to what Hitler would do with an atomic bomb.
On December 15, 1944, Heisenberg gave a lecture on S-matrix theory at ETH in Zurich. Moe Berg was there, posing as a Swiss student, an Arab businessman, or a French merchant, depending on whose account you believe. This is uncertainty: you can know that Moe Berg was in a place, but not how he got there. Were there Saudi businessmen or Dijonnese merchants? Certainly there were Swiss students. And certainly there was Moe Berg, agent provocateur.
I imagine the scene. Heisenberg, red-haired, balding, gnomish, looking older than his years, paces in front of a blackboard as he speaks. His left hand never leaves his pocket. In the audience, Berg listens attentively, taking notes. As I listen, Berg writes, I am uncertain-see: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle-what to do to H. He jokes with himself: discussing math while Rome burns. An automatic pistol weighs down Berg’s coat pocket, and a cyanide capsule slides back and forth in the watch pocket of his trousers when he shifts his weight.
Heisenberg speaks, Berg watches, and a coin spins in the air.
“Does that stop the war?” Avery asks. “If I give the ball back?”
“No, the war will happen. But your choice can change the way it ends, and what happens after.”
Avery has been thinking. “Why?” he asks. “Just because I caught a ball?”
“Partially.” The man shifts, and his right eye becomes a spinning quarter. “Think of ripples. A stone falls in water; how far do the ripples go?”
“Until they hit something else,” Avery says. He thinks of his grandfather’s cottage up north, near Traverse City. There is a pond in the woods near the cottage, and Avery catches frogs there. He is seeing the ripples the frogs make when they escape him into the brown water.
“The ball you caught is a stone thrown into the frog pond of history, if you’ll pardon my borrowing your image,” the man says. “The ripples thrown out by its fall come into contact with a sequence of other events.”
“How do you know what I’m thinking?” Avery asks.
“In one sense,” the man says, “I am what you’re thinking. Or, more precisely, what you would be thinking if you had more information than you possess at the game.”
Avery pauses for a long time, watching the quarter spin. “Are you me?”
“You’ll have to forgive me, Avery,” the man says. The expression on his face reminds Avery of the time he
