While she was working the counteragent at Škoda, she found out the real project that was going on there—the project about which the CIA had heard strange rumors that had led them to try to penetrate the Škoda Electronics Cooperative in the first place.
“It was the early eighties and they were still working with vacuum tubes. Maybe if the integrated circuit hadn’t come along in the West, we would have found the same thing out. But maybe not. In the blackbox division, they were using master glass blowers—mostly indentured dissidents, you know: ‘work for us and we won’t turn your family out of the panelak’—to run the manufacturing. Those guys were producing tubes the likes of which the rest of the world’s never seen, let me tell you. We got hold of a few and they were beautiful, even to an untrained eye. I remember showing one to this engineer friend of mine who teaches at Caltech and him just shaking his head in wonder.
“ ‘Exquisite. Perfect. But what’s the point?’ That’s what he said.”
“And that’s what we were wondering.”
“And then one night I was sitting in here, in the U Mlhy—over there at that corner table. All of a sudden, my light was blocked. I looked up, and there was Marta Plášilová. Marta Plášilová where there’d been empty air. She sat down right across from me and told me the answer to the vacuum tube puzzle.”
He took a cigarette drag, coughed. “They say I’m the one who turned Marta Plášilová. But that’s bullshit. Marta turned herself.”
“She was the deepest we ever penetrated the Czechs, as far as I know. Even then, I had my suspicions about the people back in DC. We’d had too many good agents suddenly gone east for their health. You understand that the human intelligence guy is the operative, and his foreign contact is the agent, right? Anyway, nobody but me knew exactly who she was. I felt like I was running two operations, one against the Czechs, and one to keep Washington confused.”
Electrostatics, crystal interaction with the atomic weak force, fractals, and chaos—the Czech scientists had a lot of theories, but they really had no idea exactly how what they’d stumbled on worked.
“Marta had a satchel with her that night at the U Mlhy,” Peter told me. “And she took a radio out of it. At least it was this box that looked like an old-fashioned radio from the fifties maybe. The word the Czechs used for it was the same as ours. Then she turned it on.”
It was as if the world dissociated around them. The air, the space around the radio itself, bent, like a television screen that’s lost its vertical hold. Peter tried to stand up, but there was no up to stand into. Every movement put him back in his seat.
“What the fuck are you doing, Miss Plášilová?” he said.
And then, as Marta adjusted the dial on the radio, shapes began to coalesce about them. And voices. One voice that he recognized. His own. But his own doubled, trebled. Repeating a sentence that had a cadence, but no sense to it. Because in each of the doublings of the sentence, a slight variation was made.
What the fuck what the hell what is it what are you doing what Marta are you Marta Plášilová?
He dropped the cigarette he was smoking and it tumbled endlessly toward the floor, curving, trailing smoke—smoke and reimposed smoke until it hung like a gray knot in the air, with a tiny red center, throwing sparks.
Marta twisted the tuning knob on the radio very slightly and the world came into focus; the cigarette fell.
“Look around,” Marta told him.
The U Mlhy was still. Smoke hung in the air. Smoke hung in the air and did not move. The waiter was frozen in the middle of wiping the bar. An overturned glass of beer was caught in the midst of sloshing. There was a buzzing, monotone note that was a single moment of conversation and noise, a single note of dissonance.
“It’s just you and I,” Marta said. “For as long as we want to be together.”
The Caltech engineer that Peter trusted told him that as near as he could figure, the device created an interference pattern across possible worlds generated within a specific chunk of space-time. It caused those worlds to fill in on top of one another instead of radiating off to wherever such things go.
“You could tune in to the immediate future, and make it cancel out itself,” said Peter. “The radio made a little bubble around itself and inside that bubble, you were outside of the time and space the rest of us have to live in. Until the batteries wore down.”
“And were the batteries in or out of our common time?” I asked him.
He smiled, shook his head. “That was what the Czechs couldn’t figure out. It was like the batteries flickered. So the radio eventually ran down. Marta found all that out. Marta found out everything, and told me.”
She did it for all the women from Hradec Králové who weren’t nomenklatura. All the useful and talented people without connection or power who always seemed to be the ones doing the sacrificing for the progress of the state.
“Think of how they will use this if they solve the battery problem,” she said. “They’ll have a thousand years in the blink of an eye. Generations of people working for men like… for men like the ones I work for.”
“Her eyes were dark and burning when she told me this,” Peter said. “We were in this sad little safe apartment over in Nové Butovice that we used to meet in. It was up on the tenth floor of a crumbling-down panelak. The only thing you could see out the window was more panelaks.
“That was the day when she first kissed me. She just jumped me. She’d been so distraught and worried about what would happen to her parents if she got caught, and I was trying to be something like a brother to her. I never even saw the passion, and then it was completely there. It was everything that she was. That we were. That’s the way she was. She wouldn’t chance doing anything unless it mattered completely.”
“I have to fight them,” Marta had said to Peter as they became lovers. “I have to do this because I know what it is like to have a life that you live and to have another life that you want with all your heart.”
Nothing ever got fixed in Prague and what got done was done badly back then. Chunks of old building cornices fell on pedestrians and timber scaffolding was erected to shield the sidewalks. The trams creaked and flashed through the streets as they’d done since before the Second World War, wearing the steel rails down a bit more with each passage. There was no such thing as progress. Panelak skyscraper cities of cheap concrete were caving in and falling apart fifteen years after being built. Times were difficult and the stores were empty. Peter and Marta loved one another amidst the decay.
“Once a week or so, she would use her clearance to get into the room where they kept the radio. She’d just turn it on and walk out with it, right under the guards’ noses. She had all the keys. And she’d meet me, usually in Nové Butovice. We’d both get into the radio’s field.”
The radio didn’t actually form a bubble. The shape was more like a three-dimensional wave form—it stretched out farther in some directions than others, depending on how the vacuum tubes were configured at the time. When the radio was “tuned out,” occurrences would pile up on top of itself, like they did when Marta first showed Peter the radio. It was like a black hole’s event horizon—only it would be crossed as soon as the radio operator turned the knob to get “in tune.” The act of tuning seemed to carry through, to get completed in all possible worlds. So far, nobody had tried to take their hand off the knob in mid-turn.