In the year that followed, the situation had become steadily more worrisome as Gatehouse remained inactive and nothing was learned of whether or not the German machine had been destroyed. In June 1941, therefore, Roosevelt had intensified the program further by having the NDRC absorbed into a new Office of Scientific Research & Development, operating under direct presidential control. The groups working on chain-reaction physics in the new organization were headed by Arthur Compton, Dean of Physics at the University of Chicago, and Compton had moved all of them to Chicago to be under one roof—a preliminary step to placing the whole program under direct military control.
"Enrico, hello. This is Albert Einstein. What can I do for you? I was told you sound excited."
"It's Gatehouse! Fermi's voice gabbled. "We've just got a call from the people at Gatehouse. Something's happening there!"
"Happening?"
Since the arrest of the amateur spy early in 1940, there had been no evidence of further German interest in Gatehouse. Only a reduced crew of technicians was left there now, keeping alive a fading hope that something might happen one day, and sharing the boredom with a resident contingent of military police guards and FBI.
"It's activating—a full connection!" That was as much detail as Fermi would go into over the phone. "They might be coming back. Some of us are flying to New York right away. Do you want to get over there?"
Einstein blinked and sucked his pipe. "Why, yes . . . Yes, indeed. I'd like to be there very much."
"That's what we thought," Fermi said. "Okay, put your secretary back on the line and I'll get her to arrange a car for you. We should be there in something like five hours from now."
* * *
Around three o'clock in the morning, a knock sounded on the door and two CIAF guards entered. Cassidy had arrived a short while earlier to help Ferracini dress, and they were both ready to go as Winslade had instructed.
The last couple of days had been strange, with VTOL craft of all shapes and sizes buzzing in and out to disgorge and pick up lots of self-important people who strutted about carrying briefcases, talking in loud voices, and continually badgering the CIAF officers to be let into places they had no business going. Ferracini and the others had only a vague idea of what it was all about, but that hadn't prevented some of the visitors from pestering them, too. In the end, young Winslade had ordered the Medical Block to be sealed off, and he had tripled the guards on the entrances.
So, the troops had spent the last day with Ryan and Payne, who were both improving rapidly, playing with the room's call-up-anything-you-want video system, which combined computer, library, newspaper, stereo system, and TV. They had watched live shots of a platform being constructed in orbit; a documentary about a manned mission that had landed on Mars; an industrial espionage thriller set in Russia, China, and Europe; and other snippets of the world of the twenty-first century. Because of the security that had been enforced at Pipe Organ, however, phone capability was not included—a Message Center screened all call-out requests. The few that Cassidy attempted out of curiosity to some numbers advertised openly in the directory under "Sex Partners, Groups & Clubs" had been denied.
"All set?" one of the guards inquired, keeping his voice low.
"We're ready," Cassidy said.
"Nothing to carry?" the other asked, looking around the room.
"I guess not," Ferracini said. "We didn't exactly come here prepared for a vacation." They walked into the darkened outer room, where a night nurse was sitting by the far door, bathed in a circle of light from the lamp on her desk. "Where's Floyd?" Ferracini asked.
"He went on ahead with Paddy and Ed," Cassidy replied. "We'll catch up with them over on the other side."
They stopped in front of the nurse's desk on their way out.
"Thanks for putting him back together again," Cassidy said to her. "You people did a good job, really. That's how he looks. It's normal."
"Thanks for everything," Ferracini said. "Sorry we have to rush off like this."
"We're sorry it couldn't have been longer, too," the nurse replied. "Well, whatever this is all about, and wherever you're going—good luck."
They went out in the corridor and along to the elevators, where two more CIAF guards were waiting with Anna Kharkiovitch and Keith Adamson. One of them was holding a car ready, and with few words the party descended to one of the underground levels. They followed a long, brightly lighted tunnel that led underneath the central compound to a concourse below the lobby of the main building. A couple of senior CIAF officers were waiting to take them through into the security area, and minutes later they were on their way down to the transfer lock, in the heart of the Pipe Organ complex.
They came out into another concourse and went through some doors on the opposite side to find themselves in the lock antechamber. A small group was waiting around the two gurneys on which Ryan and Payne had been brought across. It included the scientists T'ung-Sen, Hallman, and Eddie, as well as Dr. Pfanzer, both Scholders, and both Winslades. Up in the control room another handful of scientists, backed by a squad of CIAF guards, had moved the bewildered duty crew over to one wall of the room and taken their places at the key operators' stations. There was an air of urgency about the place.
Young Winslade came over to shake everyone's hand in turn, followed by young Scholder. "Well, that's all of you," he said. "I'm sorry your visit to our world couldn't have been longer. There's so much we could have shown you."
"I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but I do know you people are sticking your necks out for us," Ferracini said. "We appreciate it." Cassidy and Lamson echoed the sentiment.
"We feel we owe you at least that much," young Scholder said. Then somebody came out of the control room and signaled from the gallery.
"I hate to cut this short, but time is critical," young Winslade said. "The beam's up and centered."
"It's time," Winslade told his party.
Ferracini moved up beside the gurneys and looked down at Payne. "Feel up to traveling, Ed?"
"If we're going home, I'll damn well get off this thing and walk if I have to," Payne rasped. Ferracini grinned.
"You'll have to stay out of trouble with that hip after we get back, Paddy," Winslade said, patting Ryan on the shoulder. "You'd never be able to explain away the X-rays."
A couple of CIAF troopers took the gurneys and began wheeling them into the lock. The rest of the party followed. Scholder lingered for a moment to shake hands with his younger analog. As he did so, he caught sight of the doors of the Dispatch Preparation Area on the far side of the antechamber beginning to slide part. Behind the doors, some technicians were standing around a low, wheeled cradle carrying a fat cylindrical object covered by a shroud. They looked as if they were waiting to move forward with it. Scholder's eyes widened as he realized what the object was. "Kurt, those people back there—that's an assembled—"
"Go," young Scholder told him. "There isn't much time, and we have more work to do."
"But that's an assembled A-bomb under there. You—"
Young Scholder took him firmly by the arm. "We promised you that the link would never be restored," he muttered as he steered the older man into the transfer lock. "But we're on borrowed time already. We've received a directive relieving Colonel Winslade of his command. A force is already on its way here to replace him. They could arrive at any moment."
The ClAF troopers who had taken in the gurneys were coming back out. Young Scholder stopped at the doors and motioned the other inside. The elder Scholder turned to protest, but the doors were already closing. There was nothing more he could say or do. He turned back again and hastened to where the others were waiting. A red glow grew and engulfed them, and moments later the lock was empty.
It was like old times at Gatehouse. Einstein was there with Fermi, Teller, and Szilard; the machine was humming, its indicator panels flickering and control stations manned; and the coffeepot was brewing in the mess area at the back. Mortimer Greene stood t
ensely among the figures on the platform outside the entry port, not daring to believe fully that the light coming from inside meant what he prayed it meant. Gordon Selby was with him, having moved back from England over a year previously, and Arthur Bannering had flown up from his State Department posting in Washington.
"Locking established and beam pumping down," Fermi announced from the monitor panel to one side. "The primary node is relaxing."
The blue light inside the gate chamber faded, and then changed through green and yellow to orange. Gasps went up on all sides from the people on the platform as the outlines of human shapes became discernible within the glow. The orange dulled to red, which grew dimmer. The shapes took on solid form, and as the glow died, they began moving slowly forward.
"It's them!" Fermi shouted ecstatically from his vantage point by the port. "There's Claud and Anna! . . . Keith Adamson. . . . But there are more, too—too many."
The others were already rushing forward excitedly around him. Teller's voice rose above the cries of disbelief and uncontrollable laughter. "What's this? The soldiers are here!"
"Make way, make way," someone else shouted. "Two of them are injured. Right, bring them through."
Mortimer Greene stared at the ghosts as they came forward into the light. "My God!" he choked, and tears began running down his cheeks.
Beside him Selby and Bannering were standing too stunned to move. "Harry, Cassidy, Floyd," Selby stammered. "They're all here . . . but they can't be. . . ."
Szilard shook his head dazedly. "Those men," he protested to Einstein. "They're the soldiers, the ones who were lost in Germany nearly three years ago. How can they be here?"
Winslade was gripping Greene's shoulders and smiling. "Yes, it really is all of us. You waited, Mortimer! I knew you wouldn't let us down."
Cassidy came out into the center of the platform and stopped to pull himself up to his full height and fill his lungs with air. "We're home, guys, he called back. "I can smell it. Man, who'd have ever believed the Brooklyn waterfront could smell so sweet!"
"When is this?" Scholder asked. "What's the date? What time have we come back to?"
"November," Fermi answered.
"Which year?"
"Nineteen forty-two."
Ferracini came out and looked about him with a feeling of wonder. It was, as Cassidy had said, home. Just as he remembered it. All around him, people were shouting, laughing, and back-slapping. His eyes came to rest on one, a tall, solidly built, gray-haired figure in a navy-blue blazer and open-necked white shirt, who was standing a short distance back, too overcome with emotion to respond. Ferracini needed a second or two to register the face—it had filled out a little and acquired a beard since he had last seen it. Then he grinned, and the grin broadened slowly. "Hey, guys," he called to the others. "It's Harvey! He made it out after all! Harvey Warren's here!"
Warren moved forward as the rest of the team came up on either side of Ferracini. Ferracini saluted. "Mission accomplished, sir. All present."
"Request permission to be excused standing to attention," Payne mumbled from his gurney.
At last a smile spread across Warren's face. "Permission granted, soldier," he said.
"So you got out," Ryan said, dropping the pretense of formality. "You fixed a rendezvous with the British sub?" Warren nodded.
"How about Gustav and Marga?" Cassidy asked. "What happened to them?"
"I brought them out, too," Warren said. "They're in Canada now, under assumed names. Their son in the army was taken prisoner by the British in North Africa. He's in a POW camp and doing okay. The other one's in Sweden."
"So the war is still going on," Anna Kharkiovitch said. "North Africa hasn't fallen? The British are still fighting?"
"Churchill is the Prime Minister now," Warren told her. "They don't know how to quit over there. He's turned the whole country into a fighting machine."
Anna stared at him incredulously. "Churchill is Prime Minister? You mean it's happening? We actually managed to change some things after all?"
"Change some things? That's not half of it," Warren said. "America's fighting! Roosevelt ran for a third term and was reelected. We're in it against Germany, Italy, and Japan—all of them."
Anna gaped for a few seconds. "What about Russia?" she asked disbelievingly.
"Still going strong."
"No Nazi A-bombs?"
"No bombs."
Still seething with excitement, the crowd moved down from the platform, and MP guards came forward to help with the gurneys. "Can someone get us an outside line on one of the phones?" Colonel Adamson asked as they came down to the floor level and began moving through to the mess area.
"We must inform the President," Winslade said, nodding approvingly as he walked alongside. "But we shouldn't have to place a regular call. Don't we still have that direct line to the White House?"
"That's not quite what I had in mind, Claud," Adamson said, sounding apologetic. "I just wanted to call my wife."
CHAPTER 51
PRECEDED BY MOTORCYCLISTS AND a truck carrying armed guards, two armored staff cars climbed a winding, four-mile mountain road of widening mountain panoramas from Obersalzburg to the foot of a rocky crag near the top of Kehlstein mountain, in the Bavarian Alps. The vehicles rolled to a stop where the road ended, and the cars disgorged a bevy of braided and bemedaled officers of the Nazi high command. They converged toward a large stone archway framing an entrance, and fell in around a lean, stern-faced figure with dark, tempestuous eyes, a clipped black mustache, and a straight-combed forelock of hair showing beneath his peaked cap. He strode purposefully into the four-hundred-forty-foot-long tunnel that led into the mountainside.
"So now, admit it," Adolf Hitler challenged the corpulent figure alongside him. "Was I not proved right again in the end?"
"I have to agree that it seems you were," Hermann Goering said, puffing from the pace.
"Perhaps we shouldn't jump to conclusions," Martin Bormann cautioned from Hitler's other side. "It has been a long time."
"Pah, caution, caution—all I hear is people urging caution," Hitler sneered. "Boldness and nerve build empires. When will I hear people giving me answers with the same energy that they expend looking for problems?"
They had been about to board the train for Berlin at Obersalzburg station when a messenger from Hitler's Eagle's Nest caught up, bearing an urgent message from the director at Valhalla: The return-gate, rebuilt since early 1941 after the still unexplained security failure and the subsequent British-American commando raid, had become active again. The news had put the Führer into one of his expansive moods.
"Was it caution and timidity that got us the Rhineland?" Hitler asked as they stepped into the elevator that would take them up the last four hundred feet. "Or Austria or Czechoslovakia, both without a fight?" He surveyed his henchmen unsmilingly for a few seconds and then jabbed at his own chest with a finger. "They say I am a genius," he reminded them. "But shall I tell you a secret? Do you want to know what the real secret of being a genius is? Is it intellect? Brains? Education? The number of facts that a man can cram into his skull? . . . Eh?" He wagged a finger at them. "Books can hold all the facts you need. Graybeards and creaking academics can be hired. The roots of genius lie in the ability to make decisions, the will to stand by them and act in the face of adversity, and the nerve to see the action through unswervingly to its completion. The British call it 'sticking to your guns.' It's a good phrase."
They came out of the elevator and crossed a vestibule into the entrance hall of Hitler's mountaintop sanctum. An orderly came forward to assist the Führer with his greatcoat and take his cap, and the party moved on into the situation room, with its large map table, mural charts, and view of the jagged Bavarian peaks. "That is why I command, and the duty of Paulus at Stalingrad is to obey," the Führer went on. "The lesser will must yield to the greater. That is Nature's law, is it not? Paulus fails to comprehend the real issues in the East. His soldier's mind can funct
ion only at the tactical level. But a leader's vision is necessary to grasp the wider strategy."
"Yes, you were right about France and about Norway," Goebbels told his idol. "This will show you were right about Russia, too."
"Herr Director Mauschellen is on the line from Valhalla now," an adjutant advised, presenting a telephone handset.
"Yes, but how many agreed back in the early days of 1941 that I was right about Russia?" Hitler asked, taking the instrument. "How many had the courage to back me over Barbarossa when the repairs were completed and the new machine remained silent? 'Führer, we can't risk attacking Russia until the connection is restored,' Haider told me," Hitler said, mimicking the tone of the Chief of the General Staff. "Brauchitsch advised caution. You see, gentlemen, always it has been the same. But what would that have cost us? Two years!" He gestured with the handset. "But I had the nerve to move against Russia, even without any guarantee that the atomic bombs would be delivered in 1942. You see, I stuck to my guns."
Goering nodded and appealed to the others. "And now we are at the Volga and the Caucasus. All that would have been lost if we had waited."
Hitler raised the telephone to his face. "And now we shall see whether or not my confidence and my vision were mistaken," he whispered. Then, in a louder voice, "Hello, Herr Director Mauschellen? . . . Yes, this is the Führer speaking. . . . Oh, really? And what is the news?" Hitler listened while the room waited on tenterhooks. A triumphant gleam came into the Führer's eyes, and the others began exchanging reassured looks.
"Yes, one moment." Hitler covered the mouthpiece with a hand and sat down, at the same time directing a satisfied smirk at his followers. "It is as I predicted, he informed them. "The Valhalla connection has been restored. They are initiating the first transfer now." He made a contemptuous tossing-away motion with his hand. "So, we lost six months from the time the bombs were supposed to have been shipped through. What does that equate to at the other end—a day? Less?" He shrugged. "You see, it was nothing. Some kind of technical hitch could easily hold them up for that long. Probably the commandos who disappeared through to Overlord's end caused a few problems. The secret is to allow for the time difference and not allow yourselves to panic. That was why it was imperative for Paulus to stick to his guns in Russia. Now we will get the bombs, and the problem of Stalingrad will be resolved. And so will the whole problem of Stalin.''
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