Patton's Spaceship (The Timeline Wars, 1)

by John Barnes

  Sandy made a funny noise like a horse that’s smelled something it doesn’t like. “Have you eaten lately?” she asked.

  “Fairly recently,” I said. “Actually the idea of just sitting down and reading is pretty attractive; if I can hide my coat someplace, I’ll probably look less conspicuous, and I can sit somewhere well to the back.”

  “Good a plan as any,” the small man said. He got up and walked toward me, extending his hand; his grip was firm and strong, for such a small guy. “Any man who can upset that many cops is a friend of mine. My name’s Al.”

  We stashed my coat, and it gave me a chance to hide the SHAKK and the .45; then I went into a back corner. The first thing I did was pick up the day’s newspaper, to discover that it was August 17, 1961. There were a bunch of notes about the new president being off to a great start; from the look of the editorial page, it had actually been a contested election, the first since Reconstruction was withdrawn. Reconstruction, I had figured out, was the Nazi occupation, and since they kept referring to “the fifteen years of Reconstruction,” that seemed to imply that the Germans had occupied the US from roughly 1945 to 1960.

  The current president was a Nazi; his opponent in the 1960 election had been Strom Thurmond, and the paper seemed to be in hysterics about Thurmond the “sore loser” having the temerity to criticize the government that had won the election. Their reference to him as an “ultra-liberal crazy” came very close to making me laugh out loud … I suppose context is everything.

  I tried finding a history book—when you’ve worked in academia as long as I have, you know Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress pretty well, and it doesn’t take much time to find a thing—but those shelves were all but bare of material that covered anything since 1940. I figured that was probably a political statement in its own right. The number of basic authors who were missing from the shelves was a long list, though I did note there was more poetry and literature than one would expect.

  Most of the paper was propaganda. I noted that rents were low—ever see a thirty-five-dollar-per-month rental in San Francisco?—and roughly commensurate with the restaurant meal prices. There were several pages about how to establish “normalcy” in your household, community, and church. Normalcy seemed mostly to mean getting people to be very alike and have a positive attitude about it.

  There was an ad for the Boy Scouts … “IS YOUR SON A SCOUT? IF HE’S NOT, WON’T YOUR NEIGHBORS WONDER WHY?” The picture showed a blond boy giving a Hitler salute, and down at the bottom of the page was the Scout Law. Having been an Eagle Scout myself, I knew that one by heart … and I noted they had added three laws to it: “A Scout is white,” “A Scout scorns weakness,” and “A Scout is normal.”

  I liked it better the old way.

  Department-store ads featured about three styles of dress and did not mention anything about underwear. Suits came in four styles, one of which was “The Latest From New Nuremberg.” It took me a little while to figure out that that must be New York.

  I got bored or disgusted, I’m not sure which, put my feet up, and went to sleep. It was wonderful to be able to do that at all.

  When Sandy woke me it was getting dark outside. “You looked too comfortable to move” she said. “Come with me down to the basement—it’s where Al and I have our apartment.”

  We walked down the long flight of steps with her behind me, and when I came to the bottom of the stairs, she said, “Go left.” I turned left and went into the living room.

  Al was there, a gun leveled on me. There were four guys wearing hoods sitting around him. I heard the safety slip off and a hammer cock behind me, and I knew Sandy had me covered.

  On the table there was my Colt Model 1911A1 .45 automatic, and the SHAKK.

  “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” Al said, “and we might as well hear the first part in comfort. Sandy will give you some bread and soup, but I’m afraid we’ll have to shackle your legs to the table. If you’d like to use the bathroom first, that can be arranged. We aren’t out to hurt you or scare you, but we do need to know the truth.”

  9

  I took him up on the offer of using the bathroom, and then let them shackle me and put the food in front of me. “Eat first if you like,” Al said. “And if you’re thinking of anything other than telling us the truth, think some more while you eat.”

  I did think. Probably they hadn’t made that pistol since about 1945—everything I’d seen on the guards had been some sort of German make. And it’s trivial to check a serial number—this one would be absolutely, totally wrong.

  All that I suppose I could explain. The SHAKK, on the other hand, was utterly inexplicable. Worse yet, it had that digital readout, and it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a digital anything since I got here; 1960 was too early for calculators and electronic watches to begin with, but I was realizing that everything looked vaguely old-fashioned; either the high-tech was back in Germany, or it wasn’t in existence at all.

  I seriously doubted I could convince them that the SHAKK was a toy.

  There was the possibility that, somewhere out there, there might be a hidden base. Patton’s troops had apparently made it there, or some of them had, if I had understood Bob’s hinting around correctly, and if it hadn’t been a line he was feeding me for some obscure reason—and both those things seemed like very low probabilities. I could lie and claim the weapon had come from the hidden base.

  The trouble was, if anyone was apt to know anything about a hidden base for real, it was the people facing me. I couldn’t possibly fake my way through that one.

  I guess I could have said I was a Nazi agent with a new Nazi superweapon, and let them shoot me, but I didn’t like that option either.

  It also occurred to me that I liked these guys. I wanted their trust, and I wanted them to believe me … but I respected and admired them a lot. They couldn’t possibly have been where they were, doing what they were doing, without a ton of guts.

  So after I finished dinner, and Sandy sat down by the door, her pistol still leveled at me, I drew a very deep breath and told them the truth. I couldn’t exactly tell it in order—it’s hard to begin a story by saying “so anyway there I was more than thirty years in the future, not your future but a different future, when …”

  But I got it all out, every fact and detail, and figured that if I got shot at the end of it, or more likely quietly drugged and dropped off by some quiet little asylum’s gates, I would at least not add lying to all my sundry crimes.

  When I finished, Al thought for a long moment, then said, “So, in your timeline … name me a few major American painters since World War II. Guys who would have been unknown at the end of the war but well-known by your time.”

  I blinked—it wasn’t at all what I had expected—but then I sort of automatically started naming them. “Well, for sheer well-knownness, there’s Andy Warhol. Jackson Pollock’s stuff wasn’t well-known and really influential till after the war, really, but he had a bunch before. De Kooning, of course. But I’m really partial to one guy’s work—I had several prints of his in my place—guy named Robert LaVigne.”

  The way two of the guys in sheets sat up straight told me I’d said something important, but whether it was right or not was a good question.

  “Jazz performers?”

  “Right after the war the famous ones, I guess, are Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Dave Brubeck a little later. I don’t know jazz well, I’m just naming the guys who got a lot of publicity.”

  Maybe a little too casually, Al said, “How about writers?”

  “Since the war?”

  “Right after the war.”

  “Well, if you’re not counting pop stuff … oh, I guess J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac—”

  “Well, I’m persuaded,” one of the sheets said.

  There was nodding all around. “Either that or they’ve completely penetrated us, and we’re all dead anyway,” Al agreed. He looked up at me. “Happens that we were al
l heavy into art—to use an expression that’s officially banned for being ‘too jazz’—and you’ve at least named some likely names.”

  “Definite names,” the sheet said.

  “Likely names,” Al repeated. “Who was president during World War II?”

  “Most of it, Roosevelt. His vice president, Harry Truman, finished it out—”

  He had me recite the list of presidents as quickly as I could. I had to come up with all kinds of other bits of trivia as well. Finally he nodded, “You tell a very consistent story. It sounds like real history. Now comes the point where we have to decide to trust you … Sandy, you can unfasten him, and I think we can all put the guns away. If he’s not what he says he is, it’s too late anyway.”

  They all nodded, pulled off the sheets, put the guns away, and suddenly I found I was sitting in a room full of pleasant, intelligent-looking people without a trace of threat about them.

  “All right,” Al said, when everyone was comfortable, and they’d passed a plate of sandwiches around, “let me explain why we didn’t just shoot you. We’ve seen one of these gadgets before.” He pointed to the SHAKK.

  “About two years ago a new member of the underground turned up in the area. She went by the name of Sheila. She didn’t visibly do anything for a living but she obviously always had money; that’s no surprise, there are plenty of rich people in the underground. Sheila seemed to have really uncanny intelligence information—when she said ‘raid here on this date,’ by god the raid scored big. At first we thought she might be a police provocateur—that maybe she was getting those results because they were planting targets for us. So we asked her specifically to find us a way to hit two old high-ranking Nazis that were about due to be rotated home.

  “No problem. Sheila gave us a script, and we nailed them. There were hunts and reprisals all up and down the coast.

  “Now, as you might guess, besides VOA broadcasts—did you have VOA in your timeline?”

  “Voice of America is a government outfit in my timeline.”

  “Aha. Well, here it’s the outlaw radio. Plays a little jazz to lure the kids, broadcasts some salacious scandals to lure the adults, and then gives a few minutes of hard news and some real music, usually just before the radio direction finders zero in on the balloon carrying the transmitter. It’s generally on the air whenever we can get a transmitter up and running.”

  “And your not knowing that speaks more in your favor,” commented one of the guys who had been sheeted, a big burly blondish guy with a sort of potato nose.

  “Anyway, as you might guess, we have other major activities here, but the biggest one is to support the forces still in the Free Zone—which it will certainly not violate security to tell you is a big swath of territory running from Dutch Indonesia up through Indochina and into Burma, China, and Tibet, where there’s all kinds of rags and tags of the old Allied armies. They’ve held out against Hitler, and now Himmler, for a long time, though in the process they eventually lost the South Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines …”

  “Uh, in my timeline, a lot of that—the South Pacific and the Philippines—were in Japanese hands,” I said.

  “Not here. The Japs had to use everything they had to take Midway, the Aleutians, and Pearl Harbor right after the Germans took the Azores, and they didn’t get much for it. They got about the same deal out of the war as Hitler’s other allies like Italy, Spain, Turkey, and Hungary did … little dribs and drabs of land and the privilege of not being reconstructed. Then on top of that the Japs lost too much in their first attack on the Philippines—it had to be taken by Germans years later—and they are still bogged down in China, for that matter. A lot of us think, or hope anyway, that if Germany went down, her former ‘allies’ would turn on her instantly.”

  I nodded. “About this agent—”

  “Well, she made it clear early on that she really, really wanted to be taken to the Free Zone. There’s usually one of two reasons for that—either someone has a missing lover or relative there and is trying to get there to find them, or the person is a German spy. And the Free Zones have enough people, by and large. They don’t need bodies as much as they need skills, intelligence, and stolen weapons. So you can only go if you’ve got an important thing to bring them or show them.

  “Sheila said she did. It was a little bound volume, in black, with all kinds of physics equations and diagrams. She copied out three pages of it by hand and sent it over there, in one of our regular courier pouches. Three months later—not unusual, it takes a while to get there through channels—we got a note back saying they had to have her come out right away.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “I have it here. Sheila got worried that they were closing in on her, and wanted to make sure that if anything happened to her, at least the book would get through. Part of it was, she seemed desperate to demonstrate to us that her knowledge was needed in the Free Zone, and of course the more desperate she looked, the more we suspected her motivations. So one night she took four of us out to the big rocket base out in the desert east of Los Angeles—the ones the Germans won’t admit is theirs, and the US government won’t admit is theirs, but that lights up the sky every third week or so—and as one of the rockets was taking off, she pulled out that gadget and blew it apart with four little ‘whump’ noises. It must have been four miles up when she did that; she said what she had done was to put very high-velocity shots into it—apparently they home in, in a pattern, just as you describe—and they tore the fuel tanks apart, spilling fuel onto the hot engine.

  “The next day Sheila shot down a plane bringing the German consul back to San Francisco after a leave, from five miles off. That did a pretty good job of convincing us, and that’s when we agreed to send the pages.

  “But since she had shown us this gadget, it seemed like a waste not to use it some more. We had to be careful to use it only when there would be no direct witnesses, she said, and when the whole thing could look like an accident or when we could provide covering fire so that it looked like a lucky shot. So we had a lot of … well, fun, wasn’t it, guys?”

  Everyone nodded enthusiastically. “If we’d only been able to find a way for her to travel,” one of them added, “we could easily have bagged the president, or even the Führer. It was one hot death angel of a gun.”

  “And when we asked her where she got these things, she said only that … well, do you remember the war in Spain, back before World War II? She said something like that was going on, that the other side had help, and she was coming in to redress the balance. She described the help as ‘what the Nazis were to Franco, these people are to the Nazis,’ and she was pretty clear that she didn’t mean just in technical or military help. And it sounds to me very much like she must have been—”

  “A Special Agent, like Harry Skena,” I finished for him. “Though I don’t see why she couldn’t just jump over to the Free Zone. Maybe she didn’t have access to a base, or something. But—” the thought hit me hard. “You’re talking about her in the past tense. Has she already gone to the Free Zone, or is she—um, dead?”

  Al spread his hands; his bushy eyebrows waggled above his glasses. “To tell you the truth, when we found this gadget on you we figured either you’d stolen it from her or you were part of her team. And from the havoc you caused passing through the city—you wouldn’t believe how tough it was to get the cell together tonight with Good Neighbors and cops everywhere, and apparently there will be USSS troops arriving on a plane tomorrow to help in the search—from all that beautiful, so-cool chaos you unleashed, we thought you must be a friend of hers.

  “We’re damn glad you’re here, Mark, and one of us does some hand-loading, and we’ve still got some old .45s in action, so I think we can scrounge you a few magazines. We have a key to her place, and we’ve searched it a couple of times, but there’s not the slightest clue to anything in there, and there certainly wasn’t that blue-gray powder you were describing. Which I’m d
amned sorry about, because it would be fun to keep pulling those merry little pranks we were pulling before.”

  I nodded impatiently. “But where is she?”

  “That’s the point,” Sandy said quietly. “We were really hoping you’d know. Because tomorrow night we make contact with a sub out of the Free Zone, and she’s supposed to be there to go with the book, and she’s been completely gone for ten days. It’s like she just vanished into thin air.”

  “That could be exactly what happened,” I pointed out.

  “But if she was doing it of her own free will, why hasn’t there been a message to us? And why couldn’t she just pop back in whenever she got whatever it was done, and only be gone for five minutes in our time? And if it wasn’t of her free will—”

  “You think the Closers got her,” I said.

  “We didn’t know what they were called till now,” Al said, “but that’s exactly what we think happened. So what I suggest is that we all get some sleep; tomorrow the library is boarded-up and closed because they’ll have every Boy Scout in the city out pogging—”

  “Pogging?”

  “I think the word comes from ‘pogrom,’” he explained. “What you saw happen with the bus today. Little bastards run out of the bus and beat hell out of ‘joogers.’ Which is a contraction of Jew and nigger, but officially there are no Jews anymore in America, and the black population is supposedly all on ‘reservations’ down South, being turned back into slaves. So the word ‘jooger’ is just an insult our home-grown Nazis use for anything ‘abnormal.’ And practically all of us in Berkeley are abnormal.”

  It was nice to know something was the same between the two worlds.

  “Anyway,” Al went on, “I vote for lying low and then trying to make the rendezvous. We take Mark along, and if Sheila doesn’t show, we see if we can sub him in for her.”

  “I don’t know any atomic physics,” I protested, “and the SHAKK is useless without a reload. I might as well stay here.”