Moe Better Blues: Alexander Irvine’s “Agent Provocateur”

“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.” – from “Agent Provocateur” by Alexander Irvine

Seriously, how cool was Moe Berg? Perhaps the most incredible life-story of the 20th century never birthed as a formal biography (though an independent documentary on Berg was produced in 2007, it is apparently without distribution yet), Berg’s life was the stuff of 1940s childhood daydreaming: From playing professional major league baseball to traveling the world as a World War II secret agent was a multilingual misfit who blended in everywhere, a 13-year veteran of professional baseball who died couch-surfing in obscurity.

Now is it believable that Berg was/is a fulcrum point for the lever of the spacetime continuum itself as he was/is in Alexander Irvine’s “Agent Provocateur”? Absolutely.

As it turns out, Berg was a regular on MLB’s international brainstorming tours in the 1930s and 40s, at first conspicuously the only scrub on two rosters’ worth of headline-level stars and later serving mainly as the charming translator for traveling teams. It is said that Berg in the early 40s once delivered a lecture in Meiji University, immediately following this by taking pictures of the Tokyo skyline which would be used in American bombing runs a few years later.

For Irvine, though, Berg’s key role in history came in 1944 when under a faked Swiss passport, he attended a lecture given by that principled fellow Werner Heisenberg. In a tale equal parts Don DeLillo’s Underworld and any episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures involving The Trickster, there’s a 50/50 chance Berg believes the Germans to be capable of building an atomic bomb.

Apparently given carte blanche on the decision by the OSS, Berg was to shoot Heisenberg should he have thought the Germans close enough to Oppenheimer’s bunch in WMD development. Of course, if Heisenberg dies, you know the drill: Alternate universe time! German bomb production takes a different course as does the war in Europe, the outcome of the Space Race may differ, Americans in the 1980s might be on a steady diet of Coke-and-vodka, etc.

And everything has something to do with Berg’s mysterious seventh career home run, a dinger for the Boston Red Sox against Detroit in one of those last nostalgic days before the war … baseball really does mark the time, as Terence Mann once said – especially past time.

All in all “Agent Provocateur” is a nice tale of Schrodinger’s Cat and baseball (or is it vice-versa?) if, as stated, a tad derivative on classic sci-fi stories involving quantum-level temporospatial events. But how could Irvine have gone wrong? As Buck Bokai’s Third Rule of Disquisition says, “Everything is made better by Moe Berg.”

“Agent Provocateur” may be downloaded/read online at the Strange Horizons website.

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