The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

In summer, I take a radio out on my porch and listen to the Sox while watching the waves come in from the North Atlantic. Waves crash on every shore, and I wonder every single day if there’s some kind of middle point from which waves radiate in every direction. The still point of the turning world, as Eliot put it. The place where choices resolve into certainties.

If there is such a place, I would like very much to see it, to know it exists. I would like very much to know whether or not my choice killed my father.

***

“Done what?” Avery says.

“The quarter’s in the air. Now you’ll have to make a call before it comes down.”

“Why?” Avery looks at the man again, and he’s sitting in a chair that wasn’t there a minute ago. The quarter spins at his eye level.

“To decide what happens.”

“What am I deciding?”

“You have two choices to make, Avery. Only one depends on the coin, so we’ll deal with the other one first. Let me tell you a story.” The man shifts in the chair, getting comfortable. “In a year and a half, America will be at war with Germany and Japan.”

“No we won’t,” Avery says. “Roosevelt said we were staying out of it.”

“Yes, he did. But it will happen anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s what I do. I know. In fact, you might say that’s what I am. Someone who knows.”

Avery squints at the man, trying to make his face stay still long enough to get a look at it. “Someone who knows, huh? Well, do you know what you look like?”

“You’re misunderstanding. Avery, I only look like this because that’s the easiest way for you to see me.”

“It’d be easier if you had a face,” Avery says.

“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.”