The Boogie Dog Variations II

Blakey: Here’s the starting point - Did anyone at the Manhattan Project know?

Mattern: (cuts at a hangnail with a knife) How where they supposed to?

Blakey: Well, it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? Grobes?

Grobes: Obvious, sir, if one knows what one is to be looking for.

Blakey: (exasperated) How can it be missed? I mean, I imagine it must have been … extraordinary.

Grobes: Unfortunately, we have no records of the event. It’s like it erased itself from the minds and writings of those brilliant men as well as all photographic and other recording devices of those laboratories. And now there are no surviving phycisists to interview. I’ve combed through every published memoir I could find, Blakey. From the bigwigs – Oppenheimer, Teller, Fermi, Bethe, et al, down to the peons. Nothing tangible. Tantalizing clues, but nothing forthright. No, as far as the government’s concerned –

Mattern: (with a snort) The government …

Grobes: As far as your Uncle Sam is concerned, it didn’t happen.

Blakey: What about Main? Any leads developing on the man?

Mattern: None.

Blakey: None? I find that hard to believe.

Mattern: Sorry. Everything’s a dead end so far. He wasn’t there, according to every alphabet-soup agency document over the last sixty-plus years. As a matter of fact, he’s not supposed to exist. No records in the SSA. No military records. Nothing criminal, civil, nothing, nada. No credit history. Not even a driver’s license. Just that mention in Sibbie’s autobiography and the Hippie Manifesto.

Blakey: How about the Manifesto publisher? And how about muscling some Sibelius scholars? (rubs his temples) Good Lord, did I just say that?

Mattern: I already have some very discrete boys working both angles.

Blakey: So Mr. Main is either a physicist working on the Manhattan Project, a beatnik poet who published a ‘manifesto’ in 1967, or a violin student and acquaintance of Jean Sibelius circa 1890. (runs hands through hair in frustration)

Mattern: You know, it could be three different guys. ‘Charles Main’ is not an unpopular name.

Grobes: Or it could be a man who lived productively and polymathically over the age of one hundred. (pours a glass of cognac and reclines) You know, that reminds me of something very interesting.

Blakey: (annoyed) Yes. (shuffles more papers on the desk)

Grobes: Sibelius knew of It. Had to. Surely, Blakey, you must have heard of the Second Symphony.

Blakey: Of course.

Mattern: I don’t go much for that artsy-fartsy crap.

Grobes: (chuckles in disgust at Mattern) True, it lacks all the sophistication and delicate nuance of a techno beat … It’s rumored that those who see It … who experience It … hear something similar to the crescendo that one hears twice in the first movement of that symphony.

Blakey: I’ve listened to it a thousand times. I hear that chord in my sleep. Hey Mattern, you’d do yourself a real favor to give it at least a listen.

Mattern: (looks about for something else beside his hand to carve; finds an orange on a side table and cuts into it) Hey, Grobie, forget this music nonsense. What I really want to know is this twenty-six hour stuff. That’s what unnerved me out in Arizona.

Blakey: Those clocks were weird, man.

Grobes: Somehow It cycled or pulsed at thirteen hour intervals. Main mentions Dirac working on it. There’s a letter we discovered out at Oxford – it’s scanned in your file, Blakey – a letter from Dirac to Heisenberg that very cryptically refers in passing to a ‘26-hour sine wave function’ that, quite frankly, is beyond my abilities to analyze.

Blakey: Perhaps Montag or Funes –

Grobes: They’re already dissecting it.

Mattern: (slams the table with a fist) Damn all this sitting around! Blakey! Give me permission to hunt them down!

Blakey: There’ll be no ‘hunting them down.’ (pauses thoughtfully) At least, not yet.

Mattern: Six hippies. Six dirty hippies. Six water-hatin’ hippies … and two physicists.

Grobes: And the girl …

Blakey: Now there’s where the key lies, if you ask me.

Mattern: Blakey! Let me go after them. Get the girl, bring her back. I will show you what happens to sticky fingers!

Grobes: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ …

Mattern: What is that supposed to mean?

Grobes: (stands and walks to the curtained window) Quite simply, we’re trying to find out exactly how the world as mankind once knew it was quite literally destroyed thirty-eight years ago.