Weaver

by Stephen Baxter

  And then the newcomer came walking towards the British prisoners. Standartenfuhrer Trojan stood erect before the line of Gary and the others, and pulled his jacket straight. He looked immensely proud. Yet the man approaching was not prepossessing, despite the gaudy medals he wore. His body looked weak, his feet were pigeon-toed, his face round, his hair dark, his chin receding. He wore heavy round glasses that emphasised the softness of his face.

  Willis murmured, ‘That’s the Reichsfuhrer-SS. That’s bloody Himmler. What’s he doing here? No wonder these SS thugs look so pleased with themselves, Himmler himself coming all the way to this shithole.’

  Himmler, trailed by his entourage, shook hands with Trojan, who bowed, beaming. He waved his gloved hand to indicate the row of prisoners, and spoke rapidly in German. Willis murmured a hasty translation. ‘“A great honour Reichsfuhrer, welcome to our poor effort at a monument Reichsfuhrer, and blah blah, let me kiss your arse Reichsfuhrer ...’

  ‘How do you know German, Farjeon?’

  ‘Learned it when I joined the RAF. Useful if I ever got shot down, I thought. Wait... “Here are the men we have selected from among the Prominente prisoners for the Fountain of Life programme.“’

  “‘Fountain of Life?”’

  ‘The word is Lebensborn. Fine Nordic types all, says Trojan! That’s us, I guess. Bloody hell. Good Aryan stock!’

  ‘I don’t want to be “good Aryan stock,”’ Gary murmured.

  ‘Don’t think you have a choice right now, old boy,’ said Willis. ‘And as we’re standing ten feet from the Reichsfuhrer I’d advise you to hold your peace... We’re to be a symbol of the unity of Nordic races globally, and a demonstration of the theory that Nordic qualities rise to the top, even among prisoners and other riffraff ... Now he’s saying something else. Can’t quite get it. Something about a loom? A tapestry? That Standartenfuhrer - Trojan? - says he’s finally tracked down the one missing component, and the weapon that will cement Aryan supremacy for all future and all past is at hand ... Even for the Nazis this sounds a lot of guff. But look at old Himmler’s piggy eyes gleaming behind those glasses. Whatever this rubbish is, he loves it.’

  ‘What component?’

  ‘Him, I think,’ said Willis.

  Two beefy SS guards dragged forward Ben Kamen. He stood trembling before a laughing Himmler.

  X

  14 October

  Mary woke up to music from the Promi. The Nazi propaganda station was proving a furtive hit, even in free England. The announcer said that today was Hastings Day, yet another of the Nazis’ endless memorials - and another day off for the lucky denizens of the protectorate. Lying in bed, Mary wondered if Gary was allowed to listen to the Promi.

  Reluctantly she got up, to start another day without her son. But she had a faint hope that today might bring her that little bit closer to him.

  Her journey to Birdoswald on this October Tuesday, organised by Tom Mackie, was hopefully going to be relatively civilised. A WAAF driver picked her up from her lodgings in Colchester to drive her all the way to Cambridge, where she would take the main east coast train line up to Newcastle. And from there she would be driven further, along the line of Hadrian’s Wall to Birdoswald, where Mackie had his office.

  The car journey itself was a novelty. You hardly drove anywhere these days, such was the shortage of fuel. They passed lorries and a few packed buses in Colchester itself, but in the open country they saw few vehicles. There were plenty of road blocks though, barriers and barbed wire and pillboxes, manned by nervous-looking Home Guard types. After ten miles or so the WAAF had to stop to show her identification. She took it cheerfully. ‘More Home Guard on the road than traffic these days!’ she said brightly to Mary. She was rather jolly-hockey-sticks, very English.

  And as they set off again a squadron of planes, perhaps Hurricanes, came screaming overhead, flying low, heading south.

  Mary was oddly reluctant to leave Colchester, even for a couple of days. It was hardly a comfortable place; nowhere in England was, she imagined. But she was able to carry on her researches here, and she had her duties in the WVS, though they were less demanding now the bombing was reduced. And, only fifty miles or so from Gravesend, she was close to the Winston Line, the dreadful barrier that had cut the country in two, and so about as close as she could get to Gary.

  But for the best part of a year she had been badgering Captain Mackie of MI-14 for an interview on the subject of Ben Kamen and his historical conundrums. She had come across Mackie when he sent her a letter after the invasion, offering his sympathy about Gary, whom he had met in those final hours before the cease-fire. It had occurred to her to write back, for Mackie’s MI-14 seemed precisely the sort of organisation that might take seriously the mysteries she was uncovering, and figure out what to do about them. She could hardly be reluctant about taking up Mackie’s invitation now, even if it did mean she would have to travel to the other end of the country.

  She was nervous, though, about the hints of urgency in Mackie’s note. Something had changed, and she doubted it was for the better.

  The station at Cambridge was crowded. This was now the terminus of the east coast rail lines, King’s Cross in London having been abandoned-indeed blown up, it was said, like the capital’s other main-line stations. There were a few service personnel on the move from one posting to another, but mostly the crowds were a seepage of refugees from London, a flow still continuing after a year, women and children, old people and invalids, supervised by police and ARP wardens, all waiting for a train to the north.

  The WAAF saw Mary to her compartment, making sure her reserved seat had not been taken. Mary would have to share with a mother and her three children, and a couple of older men. The children seemed happy enough, plump little creatures dressed in layers of clothing, each with a colourful gas-mask satchel in the rack above. To them this was an adventure, a day off school. They squealed as the locomotive chuffed into life, and clouds of steam billowed back the length of the train. They made Mary smile.

  But the journey seemed long and slow, the overcrowded train hot. Mary peered out, trying to distract herself with a view of a country in the middle of its long war.

  Close to London the autumn fields were littered with burned-out vehicles and wire loops, protection against paratrooper or glider landings. The Home Guard manned pillboxes and trenches at every junction and bridge and level crossing, waiting to destroy the rail line in case the Germans should start advancing again. There was a logic to the defence, with stop lines running parallel to the coasts in case the Germans attempted any secondary landings, and other lines cutting across the country to impede any advance out of the protectorate. But Mary felt nervous at the thought of the heaps of mines and explosives the train must be passing through.

  In the stations where they stopped there were lots of uniforms, of the conventional services of Britain, the Commonwealth and the US, and of Britain’s vast volunteer armies, like Mary’s own WVS. Mary didn’t like the transformation of Britain into a country of uniforms. It was as if the German way of thinking had infected everybody, as if the Germans had already won.

  And the towns were scarred by the war. Though repair work was underway, you could see gaps in the terraced streets, holes colonised by weeds rather than people. There were defensive emplacements everywhere, anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons. And factories were hastily being erected, relocated from London and the south. There was plenty of labour to do all this work; all of England’s major towns had taken refugees from London, homeless and unemployed.

  Outside the counties of the protectorate itself, it was the capital that had suffered most severely from the invasion. London was in English hands, but, bombed and oppressively threatened, it was slowly bleeding to death. Its people and factories were being shipped out, its docks barricaded or blown up, and its many state functions transplanted elsewhere: York was now the seat of government, Manchester was Britain’s financial centre, the royal family had migrated to Holy
rood in Edinburgh, and the seat of the Church of England had been moved to Liverpool. London’s museums and galleries had been stripped, their precious contents scattered and hidden. The city itself was turning into an abandoned museum, with only its immovable architectural treasures remaining.

  There were some commentators who said that London might never recover from this cruel shutting-down - George Orwell, for instance. ‘Oh yes it will,’ Mary had heard the old crusties say in the Colchester pubs. ‘We’ll ship the Cockney buggers back ourselves.’

  So the journey passed. Everybody was quiet, save for the children. Mary thought she understood why people were subdued. All the adults in the carriage faced an uncertain future. And everybody in England had lost somebody in the war, even Mary, who didn’t belong here at all.

  It was a relief when the train pulled into Newcastle, and she was able to leave the stuffy compartment, to find another perky WAAF waiting for her on the platform.

  XI

  15 October

  Wednesday morning at Birdoswald was clean and sharp, the start of a bright fall day. Tom Mackie had requisitioned the farmhouse here to serve as his base of operations, he told Mary as he welcomed her from her hotel. But as he escorted her around the site, Mary saw how the farmhouse nestled at the heart of much older ruins, the remains of a Roman fort set on a bluff of high ground.

  ‘I can see why the Romans came here,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes, a military man would make the same decision again. Birdoswald - actually they called it Banna - was an integral part of the system of defence based around Hadrian’s Wall. Housed a thousand troops at its peak. Seems they had to drain the land, clear a forest, and import the limestone to build it. Kept the peace for three hundred years - which, if you think about it, is longer than modern Britain has existed, since the Act of Union. We’ll be doing well if we last so long, eh?’

  They walked back to the farmhouse. ‘Rather ugly, isn’t it?’ Its most recent renovation was Victorian. The architects had added crenellations, amid a general look that Mary thought of as ‘Gothicised’. ‘But they reused Roman stone. I can show you an altar of Jupiter that’s been built into the wall of a stable. And there’s evidence of occupation of the site before the Romans ... But I apologise,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For treading on your toes. You’re the historian, after all.’

  ‘Not at all, Captain. I’m impressed you know so much.’

  ‘Well, history’s always been something of a hobby of mine. I took nat sci at Cambridge - that is, natural sciences, specialising in physics. But I did do rather well at history at my school matriculation. And I’ve been somewhat keen to find out more about the history of this place since your researches directed me here.’

  Something of a hobby. Somewhat keen. After so long in Britain Mary was used to decoding the circumlocutory language of upper-crust types like this Captain Mackie: the more self-deprecating the words, the deeper the passion. ‘I’m flattered you took me so seriously. To open up a new Military Intelligence branch here, all on my say-so.’

  ‘Well, this does seem to be a pivotal site for your anachronistic conspiracy theories, doesn’t it? And it wasn’t all that hard to get the funding, actually, at least for intelligence work. For one thing there’s been a general withdrawal from the south-east, as you can imagine. Sites like Bletchley Park are suddenly a lot more vulnerable.’

  ‘Bletchley Park? Where’s that? What are they up to there?’

  ‘Oh, you know, war work, the usual. I worked there for a bit myself. And as for the project we’re engaged in here, well, the threat you’ve hinted at seems rather bizarre, but the country is awash with rumours about Hitler’s super-weapons. A Nazi time machine isn’t even top of the league table of outlandishness, believe it or not. If only for the sake of morale, the government must be seen to be making an effort to investigate all these threats, and, if necessary, put a stop to them. And you do have a certain notoriety in government, Mrs Wooler, thanks to your pieces on Peter’s Well. I actually have some quite high-level support. I’ve a line to Frederick Lindemann, Churchill’s personal science advisor. Winston calls him “Prof.”

  ‘But even so I do have to compete for funding. Even now, as things seem to be moving towards a certain denouement, I’m desperately short of anything resembling solid evidence to show my superiors. One reason I wanted to talk to you today.’

  ‘What kind of “denouement”?’

  ‘All will be revealed.’ He extended his arm and escorted her indoors. ‘But first, Mrs Wooler, let me offer you a coffee - generously supplied by your own government as it happens ...’

  ‘If you’re making me coffee, you can call me Mary.’

  He smiled. ‘And I’m Tom.’

  Mackie had set up his office in the farmhouse kitchen; it was by far the best room in the building, he said, and the warmest in winter. The most striking feature was a spear of blackened wood and heavily rusted iron, suspended on the wall over the fireplace. Mary was no expert on the period, but it looked Roman to her.

  They sat at a big scuffed wooden table, over which generations must have broken bread together, and spoke of the mysteries of space and time.

  He folded his arms. ‘Let’s start from the beginning. You developed your interest in all this because of your contact with this Austrian fellow, Benjamin Kamen.’

  ‘It was at the time of the invasion.’

  ‘Yes. He was picked up as a prisoner during those eventful days. We believe he was taken at first to a POW camp in Kent. Place near Richborough, on the coast.’

  ‘That’s where my Gary is,’ she said in a rush.

  ‘Yes, we know,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘May not be a coincidence; a lot of their more “valuable” prisoners seem to be held there - and that includes Gary, an American citizen. We actually have some intelligence that Gary protected Ben - helped him conceal his racial identity.’

  Mary wondered: helped? Why the past tense? Had something changed, for Ben or Gary?

  Mackie went on, ‘Now, your encounter with Kamen set you off on an historical investigation. But once you tipped me off I followed the chap’s career from a different direction. Before the war he was, in fact, a promising young physicist ... Bags I go first about all that, and then you can tell me about the history.’ He grinned at her. ‘You know, I think I’ll enjoy this. All rather a jolly game, isn’t it?’

  She studied him. ‘My son is in a POW camp, and I haven’t seen him for a year. I lost my daughter-in-law to an SS killer squad. I’ve followed up this crazy stuff to keep myself busy, this and my WVS work and my bits of journalism. Better than sitting around on my ass while the bombs fall. But a game, it isn’t.’

  ‘Sorry. No. Quite right. It’s just, you know ...’ He sighed. ‘Shut up, Tom. Now - Ben Kamen. Nine or ten years ago he worked in Vienna, as a student of a man called Kurt Godel. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him.’

  ‘Only in connection with Ben,’ Mary said.

  ‘Eventually Kamen made his way to Princeton, the Institute of Advanced Studies, where he met up again with his old mentor Gödel. Who by this time was working with Einstein himself.’ Mackie pulled a pipe out of his breast pocket, dug a tobacco pouch from a drawer in the table, and began to fill the bowl meticulously, strand by strand. ‘Remarkable chap, actually. Gödel, I mean. One of the top mathematicians of his generation. And Kamen must have been pretty sharp to keep up with him. He was very young.

  ‘Now, Einstein’s theories are physical. They concern the nature of space and time, the structure of the universe, that sort of show. But they are couched in mathematics, and when it comes to maths Godel has a peculiar forte. He is a master of doubt, you might say. He studies formal systems, that is mathematical theories, and niggles away at them until he finds inconsistencies. His most famous result is a proof that even simple arithmetic - you know, just adding and subtracting - can contain a statement you can neither say is true nor false. And so arithmetic, and by implicati
on all of mathematics, can never be made complete and decidable.’

  ‘You’re already losing me,’ Mary admitted.