The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

It’s July in Detroit, a Thursday afternoon in 1940. I am twelve years old. From my seat in the left-field upper deck at Briggs Stadium, I can look over my shoulder and see the General Motors Building towering over Woodward Avenue. Cars stream up and down Michigan Avenue, Fords and Chevrolets and Buicks and the occasional Nash, many driven by the same hands that built them. I look at my hands and imagine that they will become autoworker’s hands, large-knuckled and scarred, grime worked so deep into the wrinkles that even Lava soap will never get it out.

My father’s shadow falls across me. He sits on my right and balances three mustard-slathered hot dogs on his lap. I look at his hands and try to count the dozens of pale round pinhole scars that mark his wrists and forearms. My father works for the Ford Motor Company as a welder. He is thirty-one years old and seems to me to contain all the knowledge in the world.

I take a hot dog and devour it in three bites, then reach for another. “Christ, kid,” my father says around a mouthful. “You and Babe Ruth. Tell you what, why don’t we flip for this one and I’ll go get another at the seventh-inning stretch?”

On the field, Schoolboy Rowe is warming up before the fourth and the Boston Red Sox are milling around the steps of their dugout. Rowe is throwing well and the Bosox are in a bit of a slump; still, three innings could take forty minutes. I am twelve years old. I could starve to death in forty minutes.

“Deal,” I say.

Dad flips a quarter.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that the act of observing an object displaces that object, so that its true position and direction cannot both be determined at once. Or so we were taught in high school.

The Baseball Encyclopedia states that Moe Berg hit six home runs in a major-league career spanning parts of thirteen seasons with four teams. It was said of him that he could speak twelve languages, but couldn’t hit in any of them; Berg was the most scholarly of baseball players, and he made joking notes about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle while he watched the man himself lecture in Switzerland during World War II, all the while deciding whether or not to kill him. I think Moe Berg would understand the subtle shifts my memories of him undergo every time I dredge them up from my seventy years’ worth of neurochemical silt.

I was Moe Berg’s biggest fan in 1940, even though he’d sort of officially retired at the end of the ’39 season. Like him, I loved baseball, and like him, I loved to read-a combination unusual among twelve-year-olds as it is in major-league clubhouses. I even went so far as to adopt some of his eccentricities. When I found out that he wouldn’t read a newspaper that someone else had touched, I demanded that I be the first in our house to get the Free Press off the porch. Nobody else could touch the sports section until I’d gotten a look at the box scores. Only virgin agate type for this devotee of the national pastime.

Berg stayed on with the Red Sox as a warm-up catcher and a kind of team guru, but never played a game after 1939, and by the time the war heated up, he was Agent Berg of the OSS. His photographs of Tokyo, taken on a goodwill tour of American baseball players just before the war, guided Jimmy Doolittle’s bombers, and his good sense saved Werner Heisenberg’s life.

At least, that’s what the history books say. I remember things a little differently.

I remember, for example, Moe Berg’s seventh home run.

I call tails. The quarter glitters through its arc over my dad’s hand, looking like any number of slow-motion coin flips I’ve seen in fifty years of movies since then. Dad catches it in his right hand, slaps it onto the back of his left. “You sure?”

I nod. He takes away his hand. It’s tails.

“Here you go,” Dad says. The last hot dog is gone before Rowe has taken his eighth warm-up.

And then, would you believe it, Moe Berg steps to the plate. The Tigers public-address announcer sounds like he can’t believe it either; his voice hesitates, and is momentarily lost in the echoes of his last word. “Sox, sox, ox, ox, ox.” The crowd stirs, and people look up from their scorecards to see if it could actually be Moe Berg taking a last practice cut and scuffing dirt away from the back of the batter’s box. Baseball fans are always alert to the possibility of history being made.

For me, Berg’s appearance is better than a ticket to the World Series. I take off my Tiger cap and look at his autograph, scrawled across the underside of the bill last August. I’d had to fight my way through the crowd around Ted Williams to get near the dugout, and Berg was just sitting on the corner of the dugout steps, rolling a quarter across the backs of his fingers and watching the crowd for pretty girls. When I’d leaned over the railing to hand him my cap, he’d cracked a smile at the Old English D. “You know what an agent provocateur is, kid?”

“No sir,” I said, “but I’ll go home and look it up after the game.”