The Proteus Operation

by James P. Hogan

  Two days of inactivity went by. Gustav reported that he had no news of the other four. And nothing appeared in the newspaper small ads concerning the two loads of equipment that were supposedly on the way.

  CHAPTER 38

  THE YOUNGER VERSION OF Kurt Scholder looked around to make sure nobody was nearby and then quickly unlocked the door of the laser optics calibration room. It was dark inside. On top of the heavy steel optical table, the ghostly forms of mirrors, lenses, supporting stands, and other pieces of equipment were outlined in dim violet light. He produced a flashlight, directed it into the pitch black space underneath the table, and held it steady while Scholder and Colonel Adamson moved boxes and cartons to make room for themselves.

  "I still don't know what's going on, but I have to give you the benefit of the doubt," the younger Scholder whispered as they squeezed in. He helped them build a screen in front of themselves. "You should be all right here. I'll be back as soon as the check is over. It shouldn't take more than an hour or so." His footsteps hurried back to the door. Then the light from outside vanished as the door closed, and they heard the key turn in the lock.

  Scholder and Adamson shuffled around to make themselves more comfortable, and all was quiet for a while. Then Adamson murmured, "I don't understand why they're so mystified about where you've come from. I mean, the people here know how this thing works, don't they? They must know about all these crazy branching universes and what that machine we've just come out of does."

  "Not really," Scholder whispered. "I was aware of the physics, yes—when I was him, I mean—but I didn't know what the system here was really being used for. We were told that it connected to a research base in an uninhabited realm, which was being used purely for cause-and-effect experiments. I didn't find out what was really going on until later, after I went through from this world to the Germany of 1941 and found myself working on Hitler's bomb program. But of course, it was too late by then. They didn't issue us with return tickets quite so easily. Then when Hitler had the Nazi return-gate destroyed later, I was really trapped."

  "Then only a select few in this place know the real purpose of what's going on?"

  "Exactly. And even the rest of the scientists here believe that they're privileged with highly confidential information. You see, the public at large has been told only about a breakthrough in physics that enables instantaneous transportation of matter over large distances. The scientists observe the secrecy very strictly. None of them wants to risk getting kicked out of what's probably the most exciting project they're ever likely to work on."

  "Didn't anyone wonder where the bombs were going? You said you worked on them yourself. Didn't you wonder?"

  "Final assembly was done at the other end, in Nazi Germany. We knew that nuclear explosives were being sent through, but we thought they were for engineering works at the far end—excavations and so on. That wouldn't have been unusual."

  A short silence followed while Adamson thought over what had been said. "So what about the elite group, the ones who knew?" he asked at last. "Why did they cooperate? What did they imagine was in it for them?"

  "I'm not sure," Scholder replied. "How can you ever be sure of human motives? Power, maybe? Prestige? Perhaps they thought they were going to become technical high priests in the Nazi Utopia."

  "Do you have any kind of plan in mind yet?" Adamson asked after a pause.

  "I don't know. . . . If we can get the right help, simply to hold the control-room crew at gunpoint if we have to, I suppose, and force them to send us back where we came from. After that, who knows?"

  "Sounds easier said than done."

  "Got a better idea?"

  Silence.

  "No . . . I guess not."

  "The first thing will be to try and find Claud and Anna. I wonder what's happening to them."

  "I've lost all track of time." Adamson said. "How long has it been since we came out of that machine?"

  Scholder uncovered the luminous dial of his watch. "About three-quarters of an hour," he replied.

  Almost a week of nerve-racking inactivity had gone by at the Knacke house, interrupted only by two days that Ferracini and Cassidy spent reconnoitering the layout of the plant, making sketches and notes to update their information. Then Gustav Knacke arrived home after being out late one night and announced that "Druid" and "Saxon" had arrived, which told them that Ed Payne and Floyd Lamson had made it safely. Knacke had collected the arrivals from one of his drop-boxes and installed them a mile or so away in the barn of a vacated farm. The Jewish family that previously owned the farm had been forcibly resettled farther east, and the farm was awaiting new owners of approved Aryan descent.

  That night, Gustav produced a pair of heavy topcoats, scarfs, and hats, and took his two lodgers via a trail through the woods to welcome the new arrivals with a bottle of cognac and a bag of provisions from Marga. Payne and Lamson had made themselves warm and comfortable in the hayloft of the barn; they were weary and hungry, but in good shape. They had traveled to Sweden and from there entered the port of Danzig as crewmen on a Swedish coastal freighter. Then they were supposed to have assumed the identities of two Red Cross officials to cross into Germany. However, after an incident in Poznari in which a suspicious railway police inspector and an overzealous guard had ended up in a carriage toilet with broken necks, they had jumped train and relied on improvisation and expediency to cover the remaining distance.

  A day later, an ad had appeared in the paper that Ferracini and Cassidy had been watching, stating that somebody had twenty-three meters of fabric for sale at seven marks. The numbers were the odd digits of a six-figure map reference. On the same day, a different ad that Gustav had been looking for in a different paper supplied the even digits. A map revealed that the spot indicated by the combined numbers lay in a wooded area about eight miles away, where the only notable landmark was a small bridge crossing a stream. Ferracini and Cassidy drove with Gustav to a point on the road nearby and hiked down to the bridge. Not far away was a pile of brushwood and branches that had been left after tree-felling. One of the loads of equipment from England was concealed beneath the brush.

  They returned that night and took the car down to the bridge on the first of several trips to transfer the cache to the barn. Gustav was intrigued when he saw the special suits equipped with breathing apparatus. "We're working on something similar to this in the lab I'm with at the plant," he said. "A contract for the Navy, you know—an oxygen rebreathing system for underwater use. And we thought we were years ahead of you people!"

  "It's strange," Cassidy said as they loaded the bundles into the trunk and on the back seat. "This stuff shows up, and we'll probably never know who got it here or how. There are still a lot of brave people around."

  "Yes, there are. Ferracini worked in silence for a while. Then he mused, "I wonder what happened to the other load."

  Back in the office that young Scholder shared with Eddie, Eddie sat back shaking his head bemusedly and looked across at his Section Head, Dr. T'ung-Sen. "Now you can see why I figured you and John should sit in on this," Eddie said. "It's crazy, I know, but you can't argue with it—this guy is Kurt. There's no getting away from it. And if we accept that, there's no reason not to accept this cuckoo story of theirs, too."

  "It's true, young Kurt confirmed. "Some of the things he's said—answers to questions I asked him—nobody else could have known."

  T'ung-Sen brought both hands up to massage his eyes with his fingers. "A conspiracy of terror and tyranny to take over the world of a hundred years ago as a haven for our dying elites? My God, I don't know . . ."

  John Hallman, Sen's opposite number in Plasmonics, stared at Scholder with a mixture of wonder and doubt. "So, who's supposed to be in on this?" he asked. "How many of the people here know what Pipe Organ's for?"

  "Kahleb and Justinaux," Scholder replied. "Miskoropittis, Craig, Quincy, Bonorinski . . . people like that—everyone at D6 level and above, certainly. At a guess, say, oh,
five to ten percent."

  "What about Juanseres and the Security people?"

  Scholder shook his head. "They're just doing a job."

  "But how could a secret of that magnitude have been kept for so long?" Hallman objected. "Are you saying that all the other people who work here—us, for instance—could have been duped for this long? It doesn't seem possible."

  "Don't underestimate the people behind it," Scholder told him. "They may be few in number, but they still have a lot of influence. But the time to tell you the whole story isn't now."

  Hallman looked at T'ung-Sen. Sen spread his hands helplessly, shook his head, and said nothing. In the end, Eddie said, "Whether it's true or not will sort itself out later. The question that matters is, what do we do now?"

  Scholder took the initiative. "It has to be brought to the attention of the CN for a full investigation." he said. "And if the authorities here won't cooperate, then the CN will have to send in a CIAF force to make them."

  "Now wait a minute—" Hallman began.

  "It's the only way," Scholder insisted.

  "What about the Brazilian government? Are they mixed up in it?" Eddie asked.

  "They know that Pipe Organ exists, obviously, but they believe the time-travel, cause-and-effect, research-station story. So they keep the subject classified."

  "Look, would somebody mind filling me in?" Colonel Adamson said, sounding bewildered. "CN? CIAF? What are you talking about?"

  Scholder explained, "The world we're in here hasn't had a major conflict since the end of the Great War, over a century ago in 1918. The major powers abandoned large national armies years ago, and since then have practiced other forms of rivalry based on healthier ways of competing."

  "But local squabbles do break out from time to time, and situations occur that require firm-handed action. There isn't a world government, hut virtually all of its nations belong to a Council of Nations that acts as a kind of world court for settling differences—like the League that you're familiar with, except this one works. And between them the world's nations support a global organization known as the Combined International Armed Force, which gives the CN a set of quite effective teeth."

  Adamson nodded. "Okay," he said to Hallman. "So you've got the means here to deal with the situation. I don't really want to get involved. All I did was leave home this morning to spend a normal day at work. This is your century, not mine. Why can't you organize some people to take over that machine for just long enough to send us back where we came from? Then you can spend as long as you want figuring out how to get this place closed down."

  Hallman stared at him incredulously. "Send you back? You've got to be joking! You can't expect to just materialize out of nowhere with a story like this and then disappear as if nothing had happened. Who knows what you may have started?"

  "What do you mean, we started?" Adamson protested, becoming genuinely alarmed. "Look, it was your goddam machine that got us here. We—"

  "You tapped into our line," Hallman retorted.

  Scholder held up a hand and nodded resignedly. "If we have to remain for a while until this is cleared up, then so be it," he conceded. "But that's all going to take time. Meanwhile, there are still two more of our people in this place somewhere. I want to find them and get them out of wherever they are before we try anything else."

  Hallman drew a long breath as if struggling to contain his patience, then exhaled abruptly. "Oh, the thing to do is hand it over to Security," he said. "I don't see that this is any of our business at all."

  "That might be a bit hasty, John," Sen cautioned. "If there is something in this story, relying on Security could be a mistake. Their responsibility is to the wrong management."

  Hallman looked disgruntled, but wasn't inclined to argue the point. "Well, what else then?" he invited.

  "I suggest we take it to Dr. Pfanzer," Sen said. He glanced at Scholder. "Is he safe?"

  "As far as I know, yes," Scholder said.

  Hallman hesitated. On the one hand, he was a scientist with an aversion to getting mixed up in politics; on the other, he was a scientist—curious. This was much too intriguing to just dump on someone else and forget.

  Before Hallman could say anything, the younger Scholder, who had been sitting with his chair tilted hack and a distant expression on his face, looked at his analog and asked, "Just out of curiosity, does the word 'Proteus' mean anything to either of you?"

  "Yes," Scholder said. "It was the code name for the mission that was sent back from 1975 to 1939. Why?"

  "Ah, then that solves it," young Scholder said. "Before the alert, I was talking to some of the guys on last night's duty crew from Transfer Control. It seems there was a strange interference on the beam sometime early this morning. Nobody had seen anything like it before. It happened again just before lunch. What was so puzzling about it was that when they put the recordings of the interference through the computers for pattern analysis, it turned out to be coded in standard Morse. The word it spelled was 'Proteus.' "

  "That was us," Scholder confirmed.

  "I'm not sure I follow," Sen said.

  Scholder explained, "When we had a partial resonance, we tried to signal to what we thought was 1975. . ." His voice trailed away, and he seemed confused suddenly. "'When did you say this happened—this morning? I don't understand."

  "The last time was about three hours ago, and the first time was, oh, about four hours before that, I think they said," young Scholder replied.

  Scholder turned toward Adamson with a puzzled expression. "But we sent that signal back at the end of January, didn't we, Keith? And the time before that was in December, Christmas Eve, to be precise. . . . I don't—" Then his eyes widened as the realization of what had happened suddenly hit him. "Of course!" he whispered. With everything that had taken place since their coming out of the machine, there hadn't been time to think. It hadn't even crossed his mind. "Oh, my God!"

  "What is it, Kurt?" Adamson asked.

  Scholder moved over to the two desks. "Excuse me a second.'' Eddie leaned aside while Scholder activated one of the video terminals. "Einstein—he was working with us—deduced that time would run slower if you move forward into the future. He worked out a fourth-power law that depends on the amount that you go forward by." Scholder entered a calculation into the computer. "Keith, do you remember that we said time would be slowed down by a factor of five-point-seven when we arrived?"

  "Yes," Adamson said.

  Scholder stared numbly as the result appeared on the screen. At last he swallowed hard and said, "That assumed that we would be reconnecting to 1975, only thirty-five years into the future. But we've actually arrived eighty-five years into the future. On a fourth-power law, that gives a factor not of five-point-seven, but of two hundred!" Adamson failed to grasp the implication at once. "We've been in this world for something like two hours now," Scholder said. "That means that back in our own time, sixteen days will have gone by since we were in New York! Back there it's the middle of March already. I'm afraid that you probably have a very worried wife."

  Scholder nodded slowly to himself as a number of other things suddenly became clearer. Now he could see why the timetabling of transfers to and from Germany had been so critical: Every minute lost at the 2025 end would equate to more than three hours lost in 1940. No wonder all the planning, and most of the meetings and conferences had taken place in Germany, not Brazil. But there was more to it than just that.

  He looked at Hallman, his eyes deadly serious now. "We can't afford to fool with the CN," he said. "There isn't time. Do you realize what this means? Time is running two hundred times faster in the world we've come here from. For every two days that we spend talking here, over a year will pass by there—in a world where civilization is being overwhelmed and nations crushed by a form of barbarism that you people in your comfortable world here are incapable of imagining. But it was your world here that unleashed it. The bombs for nineteen forty-two are being readied here right now! Can
you imagine that, Dr. Hallman? Can you imagine turning madmen with nuclear weapons loose in the world of a hundred years ago? Well, that's exactly what you've done. Now tell us again that we should just hand it over to Security and wait for somebody to talk to the CN."

  A strained silence followed Scholder's outburst. Then Hallman nodded curtly. "Let's go and talk to Pfanzer."

  CHAPTER 39

  THE NEWS THAT CONTACT had been lost after Winslade, Anna, and Scholder disappeared into the Gatehouse machine with an American colonel had naturally caused great concern among Churchill's group in England. When over two weeks went by with nothing further of them, the concern turned to consternation.

  With the likely outcome of Ampersand far from certain, the development of a Western atomic bomb to counterbalance the Nazi threat immediately assumed crucial importance; since most of the experts in America were trying to find out what had gone wrong at Gatehouse, the focus of atomic research shifted for the time being to Britain. The main centers of the British program were the universities of London, where a Professor Thomson was experimenting with fast and slow neutrons at Imperial College, supported by the Air Ministry; Liverpool, under James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron; and Birmingham.

  At Birmingham, Lindemann introduced Gordon Selby to the group working on uranium fission under a Professor Rudolf Peierls and Dr. Otto Frisch—the same Otto Frisch who had brought the news from Sweden to Copenhagen in December 1938, of the Hahn-Strassmann experiment performed in Berlin. He had been visiting England at the outbreak of war and elected to stay. One quick result of this collaboration was a realization by the Birmingham group that the critical mass of uranium 235 (the minimum amount needed for a workable bomb) was measured not in tons, as they had previously imagined, but in pounds. This altered radically their whole outlook regarding atomic weapons feasibility. In response to a paper by Peierls and Frisch, and under heavy prodding from Lindemann, the government established a group that came to be known as the Maud Committee to monitor and supervise further nuclear work. Lindemann explained to the surprised British researchers that he had obtained Selby temporarily on an exchange deal that he'd worked with the Americans. "You'd be surprised what they're doing over there," he told them. "Some of the people they've got are way ahead of their time!" At least it was being honest.