The Proteus Operation

by James P. Hogan

  "If it's the same 1975," Teller said. "We don't know how many universes might be aiming probe beams back at the zone we're in. How do we know we've hit the right one? What's the probability of another 'crossed wire ? In fact, just how does the whole mess manage to keep itself untangled at all?" He sighed heavily as they descended the steps of the loading dock. "There's so much that we don't know."

  Fermi was equally baffled. Instinctively, the two of them looked at Einstein. "I haven't the faintest intention of spoiling my Christmas by even thinking about it," he informed them as they climbed into Teller's car.

  A plainclothes military policeman opened one of the large doors to let the car back out. Evening was closing fast. Flurries of snow filled the air, and slush from an earlier fall still covered the ground. Just as Teller was about to engage first and move away, a shout came from across the road—a woman's shout. The three in the car looked around.

  A week or so previously, someone had rented the small storehouse with adjoining office shack across the road. It had been standing empty since the summer. One day, a truck had appeared to unload a few crates, but the only signs of life observed since then by the Gatehouse security guards had been a woman going in and out once or twice, her car parked outside for most of the day, and a light inside the window. The officer in charge of security had requested a routine check, but nothing amiss was found. Now the woman was running toward them and waving.

  "Don't go—wait a minute!" She arrived, puffing, at the car, a woman in her mid-forties, perhaps, a little on the plump side, wearing a fur hat with earpieces and a heavy tweed coat. Teller wound down the window. "Thanks," the woman said. She rested her purse on the window ledge and got her breath back. "Sorry to trouble you, but I've been an idiot. I left my headlights on, and now the battery's dead. Could I get a start off yours? I can't use those hand-cranks, and I do have some cables."

  Teller glanced at the others, nodded, and was about to reply when the security guard who had opened the door came over and intervened. "That's okay, sir, you carry on," he told Teller. Then, to the woman, "I'll come over in just a second and crank it for you, ma'am."

  "Thank you. You're so kind."

  "All part of the service." The guard waved Teller on his way, and the car moved off along the street. Then the guard turned and began walking back to close the warehouse door. The woman followed him, but he stopped and raised a warning hand. "Ah, wait out here, ma'am, if you don't mind," he told her. "I'll just be a few seconds."

  The woman, who was known as "Musketeer," stopped obediently. She could see from where she was standing that there was nothing remarkable inside the doors. But she had managed to get a good view of the three men in the car. Albert Einstein she had recognized immediately. She hadn't known the other two, but she'd got a good shot of their faces from the car's window ledge with the camera built into her purse. And there had been plenty of time to memorize the license-plate number.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE WINTER OF 1939-1940 was the coldest that Europe had experienced in forty-five years. Around Britain the Channel froze off Folkestone and Dungeness; the Thames was solid ice for eight miles from Teddington to Sunbury; and in parts of Derbyshire the snow drifted up to the roofs of farmhouses and cottages.

  On the fifth day of the New Year, Minister of War Leslie Hore-Belisha resigned, the first of Anna Kharkiovitch's "baby hedge-sparrows" to be pushed from the nest, and there was a reshuffling of ministers; the machinations that Winslade and Bannering were orchestrating from behind the scenes were producing tangible results. Whether these would add up to enough and in time, however, was another matter.

  Ferracini and the rest of Ampersand knew no more about the incident than appeared in the papers; they didn't have too much time to care what might be behind it. They spent the Christmas and New Year period with one of the British regiments training on Dartmoor, a bleak expanse of wild and windswept heath, scrub, hills, and bogs on the Devon-Cornwall peninsula. Officially, they were listed as American volunteers temporarily assigned to the unit pending further posting elsewhere.

  Although the course was tame in comparison to the brutal physical and psychological demands of the three-month screening process that would-be Special Operations volunteers endured, everyone in the Ampersand group was grateful for the program of calisthenics, combat sports, and swimming that Major Warren had imposed during the months at Gatehouse. For a month, they raced with full battle-packs over treacherous, ice-bound assault courses; hauled themselves, cursing and perspiring, up climbing nets; scaled walls and ramparts; and negotiated swaying plank and rope bridges over deep ravines. They trudged for days on cross-country marches until blisters appeared and hardened on all the old, familiar spots on their feet; and they went through open-air physical drill, jumping, climbing, vaulting, and performing team sit-ups, squats, and presses with telephone poles, ten men to a pole.

  During the course, they saw why Warren had abandoned his idea of replacing their missing reinforcements with British volunteers. Perhaps letting them see the reasons for themselves had been part of his purpose in arranging the program.

  It wasn't that the British troops lacked guts or spirit. Far from it. The Tommies for the most part were enthusiastic and hard-working, didn't complain too much, and accepted the inevitable screw-ups and lousy breaks that were the soldier's lot with cheerful resignation. Lean and hardy like their American counterparts after the years of the economic slump, they were keen to get over to the other side, get the job done, and come home again. They knew that was how it would happen because that was how it had always happened.

  That was the problem: They had no idea what they were up against.

  They were inexperienced, naive, and totally trusting in officers who belonged to a world that had ceased to exist. The Germans were "all wind and trousers," a lance corporal from Wigan told the Americans over a supper of bullied beef, beans, and gravy. "They like marchin' oop an' down wit' flags an' bands, an' pushing poor little booggers like Poland around, but when somebody who means business finally puts 'is foot down, they soon go scurryin' for their 'oles." The same mistakes hadn't been made this time as in 1914. The Maginot Line was there now, and the blokes behind it were ready.

  Ready for what? Ferracini wondered.

  Their combat training consisted almost entirely of a few sessions on a rifle range and in grenade pits—with limited ammunition—and formalized, old-school bayonet drill. They learned how to dig trenches, shore them up with timber, and fit duckboards; how to bianco webbing; and how to shine boots. It was ironic: yes, all the things were being done right that should have been done in 1914. But this was 1940.

  What of antitank weapons? What of tactics for dealing with massed, air-supported armor smashing through on narrow fronts and racing along main roads at speeds that would have left the Great War commanders paralyzed? The German field tractors could haul rubber-tired, six-inch guns up rough hillsides at forty miles per hour to bring close artillery support right up behind the tanks. How could fixed batteries, dug in miles behind a front that would supposedly remain static, be expected to counter them? What of cooperation with friendly tanks and aircraft? The German commanders used radio to keep track of movements in the highly mobile, fast-changing situations that they anticipated. How could generals who still depended on dispatch riders and runners hope even to know what was happening, let alone do anything to affect it?

  At one training session just after New Year's Day, Ferracini, Cassidy, and Lamson looked on in disbelief while a British brigadier, complete with knee-high cavalry boots, white walrus mustache, and port-wine complexion, gave instruction on tackling the Junkers 87 dive bomber—the infamous Stuka—with a rifle. "You'll find it quite straightforward if you keep your heads," the brigadier assured his attentive flock. "Stand up to them and take them high on the climb, like a pheasant. A brace a day per man would add up to a jolly good bag—what?" Confident laughter greeted the remark. The Americans didn't laugh.

  The next d
ay, the hand-to-hand combat instructor, a big, sadistic sergeant from Glasgow who liked knocking the new recruits about, picked on Floyd Lamson as a stooge and came out of it lightly with a cracked collarbone, torn cartilage in the neck, and a raw shin. Cassidy explained hastily to the shocked C.O. that Lamson had ancestral blood from an Indian tribe notorious for its instability.

  "They were the ones who wiped out General Custer," Cassidy told the officer, while Lamson winced inwardly. "His grandfather was a cannibal. It's not really his fault. . . . And they do make good scouts." The C.O. gave Lamson the benefit of the doubt and dismissed the affair with a plea for him to at least try to behave like a civilized Christian. The number of beers subsequently bought for Lamson at the pub not far from the camp by grinning young Britishers more than compensated.

  The British weren't the only ones gearing up to fight the last war all over again. The French, if anything, were worse; and from what Ferracini and the others had heard and read in the course of almost a year in America, the majority of U.S. generals still seemed to be having trouble grasping that the planet continued beyond Maine. It wasn't so much that they were slow in responding to change. Leaders and rulers always had much to lose and little to gain from the disruptions brought by change; therefore, invariably, they constituted the conservative elements of society. That much had been true throughout history. The difference this time was that the thinking of one side was being shaped by minds whose experience came from eighty-five years in the future.

  Even so, the Ampersand troops agreed privately, in the four months that had gone by since the beginning of September, the West's leaders should have learned more from Poland than they had.

  The New Year was colder and icier than usual, even in Berlin. Despite years of incessant, vitriolic Nazi propaganda, the majority of the population hadn't wanted war. In contrast to the scenes of frenzied jubilation amid which the German armies of 1914 had marched off to the fronts, the streets had remained quiet and empty at the news of Poland's invasion. Now with things like the blackout, a war surtax of fifty percent on top of income tax, the virtual disappearance of gasoline, the introduction of ration cards for food, soap, shoes, and clothing, and coffee's replacement by a coarse substitute made from roasted barley seeds, the average Berliner felt the cold of 1940 psychologically as well as physically.

  The scene in the Tiergarten presented a curious contrast, with children skating on frozen ponds and sandbagged antiaircraft batteries brooding menacingly beneath snow-laden camouflage nets. Colonel Piekenbrock and Lieutenant Colonel Boeckel were taking a lunchtime stroll from the Bendlerstrasse. They walked slowly side by side, caps pulled low, faces tucked down behind the upturned collars of their greatcoats, the snow crunched beneath their jackboots.

  "There's no chance of mistaken identity?" Piekenbrock said. His breath turned to white vapor in the cold air as he spoke.

  Boeckel shook his head. "The faces were identified independently by three experts. Also, the car was registered in Teller's name. We're quite certain."

  They walked on in silence for a while. "So what do you make of it?" Piekenbrock asked. Boeckel knew by now that this tendency of Piekenbrock's didn't mean he was perpetually devoid of ideas. It was simply his way to ask a subordinate's opinions before voicing his own. It helped him recognize talent, and it disarmed yes-men.

  "Well, we seem to have uncovered a small, but highly professional, unpublicized unit of the American Army, specially trained in guerilla methods and undercover operations. They've even staged practice missions from a disguised base in New York."

  "Agreed," Piekenbrock said, nodding.

  "And now we find Einstein visiting this same base. Not only that, but he's with Teller and Fermi, both of them specialists in the same field." Boeckel glanced at his superior uncertainly.

  "Oh, yes, yes," Piekenbrock said, waving a leather-gloved band impatiently and thrusting it back in his pocket. "You can say it. Einstein is a great scientist. Never mind the nonsense that Goebbels churns out for the masses. And you say that this Hungarian and the Italian specialize in the same field. What field is that?"

  "I made inquiries at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute," Boeckel replied. "About a year ago, an important experiment was conducted here in Berlin which caused an international stir among physicists investigating the inner structure of atoms. Apparently, there are good reasons to suppose that atomic processes involving the element uranium might release quite large quantities of energy—enormous quantities, in fact. Some of the scientists at the KWI say it could lead to a revolution one day in powering industry, ships, and so forth. And in weapons."

  Piekenbrock frowned. "Atoms? But they're just tiny things, aren't they?"

  "Extremely so, sir."

  "Amazing. Anyhow . . ."

  "It seems that both Teller and Fermi are noted for their work in that field. In fact, Fermi was awarded a Nobel Prize for his contribution. He ran away to America when he went to Sweden to collect it."

  "A Jew?"

  "His wife—partly."

  "I wonder if we can really afford to lose too many people like that in the long run. Anyhow, that's not our department."

  They came to a small hump-backed bridge over a frozen stream and stopped for two Wehrmacht generals going the other way. The generals returned their salutes as they passed. They carried on walking again, and Boeckel continued, "In the last year, official interest in uranium has been expressed in England, France, and America. Also, in America especially, there has been a marked decline in the amount of information being published on research connected with the subject. In other words, it seems that the West might be taking this notion of extra-powerful weapons seriously."

  "Do you think this could have something to do with the super-bombs that the Führer has been telling us we'll have in two years?" Piekenbrock asked.

  "Yes, I think it could," Boeckel replied. "It seems that both sides are onto the same thing.

  Piekenbrock nodded. "And the Americans have trained a special unit to infiltrate Germany and conduct espionage or sabotage operations on what our people are doing," he completed. "These scientists were probably going to the training base in New York to give technical briefings on what to look for and things like that, eh? It makes sense. I think we can forget this idea of an assassination squad being sent after the Führer."

  "My conclusion also," Boeckel agreed. He waited for a moment; then, seeing that Piekenbrock wasn't about to reply at that point, he went on, "I've been doing some further checking that suggests there might be still more to the story."

  "Oh?"

  "There seems to be some kind of a network of people involved on both sides of the Atlantic. For instance, Fermi and Teller are both at Columbia University in New York. Another Hungarian, called Szilard, is also involved there. He isn't on the official staff, but lives in a hotel along the street. Now, he was previously engaged in similar work in England. One of the people whom he worked with was a Professor Lindemann, who is a personal friend of Churchill's and also his most trusted scientific adviser."

  "Ah, so Der Lügenlord appears in the picture, does he?" Piekenbrock murmured. "Lying Lord" was the German newspapers' latest term to describe Churchill. He was also referred to widely by his initials, WC, which were written on the door of every German toilet.

  "Lindemann spent some years here in Germany, and he and Szilard were mixed up in getting Jewish scientists out of the country," Boeckel went on. "Now Lindemann has moved into Churchill's Admiralty headquarters in London. Einstein stayed at Churchill's Chartwell mansion when he was in England in 1933. Einstein and Szilard were colleagues in Germany. Teller was there, too, at the time. He met Fermi in Italy before Fermi went to America. You see, the same names keep appearing. They're linked in some kind of pattern, but I haven't managed to interpret it yet."

  Piekenbrock halted at a junction in the path. Boeckel waited. A short distance away, an old woman was struggling to haul a wooden sled carrying a sack of coal, while a small boy pushed in the s
now behind. Coal was the worst of the shortages that winter. Reportedly tens of thousands of homes in Berlin were without heating at all.

  "If they are all part of such a network, then our American friends would no doubt stop off at England on the way, wouldn't they—to coordinate with the Churchill end of the operation?" Piekenbrock said at last.

  "Very probably," Boeckel agreed.

  Piekenbrock nodded slowly. "I'd like a special watch kept for them at the places they might be expected to appear— Churchill's naval headquarters in London, for example," he said at last. "It would be a useful confirmation of our guesses, and we might get a better idea of what they're up to." He paused. "How much of our work on uranium is going on at the KWI? Is it concentrated there, or are things going on at other places, too?"

  "It's a confused situation," Boeckel said. "The KWI people are working under a Professor von Weizsäcker, with support from the War Office. But there's another professor, called Esau, who's running a setup for the Education Ministry over on Linden, and the Ordnance Department has something going at Gottow. It's not clear how all the pieces fit together. Sometimes, I think it's easier to find out what the enemy's doing than these infernal bureaucracies of ours."

  "Well, get a picture together of what's happening, and especially where," Piekenbrock said briskly. "I'd like a list drawn up of the major centers where work is in progress on this uranium business. If we do get wind that those Americans are on their way over here, it might be as well to know what their potential targets might be."

  "I'll begin at once, sir."

  "You've done some good work, Boeckel," Piekenbrock complimented. "Keep it up. You should go a long way. . . . Oh, and I trust that things are under control concerning that matter to do with your secretary?"