The Proteus Operation

by James P. Hogan

  The exhibition covered a 1,216-acre site and had cost $125 million, Payne read as he thumbed the pages. The area was divided into zones, each of which was dedicated to a specialized depiction of the progress of man and civilization. There was a Hall of Transportation, a Hall of Communication . . . halls of Production, Health and Public Welfare, Government, Education, Recreation and Amusement . . . all of it adding up to and reinforcing the central theme underlying the whole event: "Building the World of Tomorrow." The intention of it all, the introduction read, was to show the significance of today's scientific and material achievements and how they would enable the world to live and work in harmony—to provide an interpretation of the modern world and where it is leading. There was a Central Theme Building, through which visitors would be carried on a moving platform to view the World of Tomorrow.

  Payne snorted quietly. The visitors wouldn't see a firestorm raid on Calcutta by Japanese heavy bombers, a slave labor camp in Siberia or the Middle East oilfields, or some of the grotesque medical experiments performed without anesthetics by the Nazis' so-called doctors.

  Despite Cassidy and Ferracini's bantering over cards, the mood at Gatehouse was tense. Anna was upstairs, no doubt immersed in her work; Selby was barricaded behind The New York Times, next to the coffeepot; Ryan was listening blank-faced to Amos and Andy playing from the radio on its shelf; and Lamson was dismantling, cleaning, and reassembling his gun for the third time that morning. Nobody wanted to admit the nervousness they all were feeling while they waited to hear the outcome of the conference going on in the front office between Winslade, Greene, Scholder, and Major Warren. But at the same time, none of them could take the pretense to the point of feigning indifference. They all knew that they all knew.

  Something had gone very wrong with the project. The mission should have made contact with its own time, and it hadn't. It was now clear that the communications connection from 1975 hadn't been a link back to them, because at their end nothing had happened.

  Payne was a doctor, not a physicist or a philosopher, but it seemed to him that the answer had to lie in the existence of not just one, but many worlds, all differing from one another in ranges of variation that stretched from the barely perceptible to the totally distinct. If so, then could the 1975 machine have somehow connected through to the wrong one? He rubbed his chin and stared at his book while he thought about it. But if that were true, then how could some other world's past have a Proteus team in it? Only one team had been sent, and that team was right here, in this world. No, the explanation didn't make sense. Nothing made any sense.

  The sound of footsteps descending wooden stairs came from outside the room, and a few seconds later Anna came in.

  "And here's one of my favorite Russians," Cassidy said, looking up. "You working overtime again, Annie? Come on, sit down. We'll teach you to play the game."

  "Thank you, but another time. I have to take another rain check, I'm afraid."

  Cassidy sighed. "I'm losing my touch, Harry. Look, you're my best buddy. You'd tell me—do I use the wrong soap?"

  Anna smiled and walked over to where Payne was sitting. "Are you busy, Ed?" she asked.

  Payne looked up. "No, just killing time like everyone else. "Why?"

  "I'd like another look at some of the surveillance pictures from a few weeks back."

  Payne hesitated for a second, then nodded, set down the catalogue that he was reading, and got up. He followed Anna out of the mess area and along the passage outside. They came to a door, which Payne unlocked and opened to reveal another office. "Movie or stills?" he asked as they entered.

  "Stills will be fine," Anna answered. "I'm interested in those gangsters who were here—the ones Mortimer talked to. I'd especially like another look at their leader."

  Payne walked over to some metal filing drawers and opened the top one to pull out an index. "We should have some sets of facial shots of those guys already enlarged," he murmured as he scanned one of the sheets. "Yes, here we are." He opened another drawer and flipped quickly past several tabs, stopping at the next to pull out one of the brown envelopes that contained blowups of shots from the security cameras hidden around the building. "Out of curiosity, what do you want them for?" he asked as he handed the envelope to Anna. His voice sounded more than just idly curious, but she pretended not to notice.

  "I just want to check something, Anna replied vaguely. "Thanks, Ed. I'll return them as soon as I'm through with them."

  She took the envelope back upstairs to her own office. Inside, she sat down at the table, took out the photographs, and compared a couple showing Fat-lips with the picture accompanying the article that she had been reading earlier. There was no doubt about it: Fat-lips was Bruno "Iceman" Verucin.

  Anna sat back in her chair and pondered what it might mean. Despite his fastidiousness at times, the troops had a genuine liking for Mortimer Greene—which was only to be expected, since an inability to command their respect would have disqualified him from the mission in the first place. And there was no doubt that they had been angered by Fat-lips's effrontery, especially Cassidy; but that wouldn't have constituted a sufficient reason. Anna couldn't see soldiers who had been trained to Special Operations standards of discipline making a personal issue out of something like that. There had to be something else. And she was beginning to suspect that she wasn't the first to have spotted the connection. She had seen Payne's expression when she told him which pictures she wanted.

  The buzzer on the intercom unit to one side of the table interrupted her thoughts. She stretched out a hand and pressed a button. "Yes?"

  "Anna, it's Ed again," Payne's voice crackled from the box. "Claud and the others have come out. They want everyone assembled in the mess area. Could you come back down, please?"

  "Yes, of course. I'll bring the pictures, too. They've told me what I wanted. I'll see you in a moment." She switched the intercom off.

  And then, as she rose from the chair, Anna recalled overhearing Ferracini and Cassidy talking about the same Fat-lips and his cronies beating up some friends of theirs at the club) they frequented in New York. One of them was a girl that Ferracini in particular had sounded uncharacteristically incensed about—much more than a Special Operations trooper ought to have allowed himself to be.

  "Ah, so that was it," Anna said softly to herself, smiling as she slipped the photographs back into the envelope. "She must be quite a lady."

  Since all seemed to have gone well, she could see no purpose in starting a fuss now. But not everybody, of course, might feel the same way. She picked up the envelope and left the office to go back downstairs.

  CHAPTER 14

  ANNA CAME BACK INTO the mess area to find that the others from the front office had arrived and were waiting for her. Kurt Scholder had found a seat near Selby; Mortimer Greene was standing by the door; and Major Warren had pulled a chair up to the table at which Ferracini and Cassidy had been playing cards. Winslade paced in the open space in the center of the room while Anna found herself a chair. He was wearing a polka-dot bow tie—a favorite style of Churchill's that Winslade liked and had adopted—but for once his manner failed to match the mildly eccentric joviality of his dress. The others watched and waited silently. At last he stopped and drew himself up to face them directly. His expression was serious.

  "Last month," he began, "Hitler and Mussolini announced the full military alliance that we have been expecting, which they call the 'Pact of Steel.' It commits them to armed assistance in the event of either's becoming engaged in hostilities and affirms a common foreign policy of conquest and domination. A day later, on May 23—assuming events have continued to follow the course familiar to us—Hitler should have called a conference of his military chiefs in Berlin and told them bluntly that war is inevitable if further successes are to be achieved. In fact their 'Case White'—the operational plans for the attack on Poland—will already have been submitted by the Army General Staff. Danzig is just a pretext. The decisions that will plung
e Europe into catastrophe in August have already been taken."

  Winslade made a brief, empty-handed gesture and swept his eyes quickly around the room. "The purpose of this mission was twofold. First, to set up a return-gate here in the United States in order to counterbalance the forces operating behind Hitler. Second, and of more pressing urgency, to bring about some improvement in the condition of England and France." He took a long breath, held it for a second or two, and then exhaled abruptly. "It's my duty to tell you all now, officially, that so far we appear to have failed in both objectives. We cannot pretend that the results of our efforts in Europe have been anything but disappointing. And the situation here, you all know. The communications connection back to 1975 has not been established as was anticipated, and we are forced to acknowledge the possibility that it may never be."

  Winslade clamped his mouth shut and looked back at his listeners poker-faced, waiting for the full meaning of his words to register. Silence fell for a few moments, then was broken suddenly by a sharp snapping sound as Floyd Lamson bit right through the pencil that he was chewing. Gordon Selby and Anna stared at the floor; it was as they had been suspecting for some time. Ryan was looking dazed.

  Captain Payne brought his fingertips up to his brow and shook his head. "Then how . . . If the pilot channel isn't opened, that means we won't be able to get the main transfer port operating, either.

  Winslade nodded curtly. "Quite."

  Ferracini's first reaction was a numb inability to comprehend. It would soak in slowly, in its own time. He knew at a rational level what the words meant, but emotionally he was detached, groping unconsciously for any distraction. And suddenly the look on Cassidy's face, jaw hanging open and eyes wide with shock, seemed uproariously funny. "Hey, Cowboy, maybe you won't be sending us those pictures of the yacht from the Bahamas, after all," he heard himself say. Cassidy gaped at him, but was too stupefied for the moment to answer.

  Mortimer Graeme nodded. "Harry's got it. What Claud's saying is, there mightn't be any way back."

  Winslade stared unblinkingly through his spectacles. "Yes. And just to be sure there are no misconceptions, let me spell out for you what that means. Three thousand miles away across the ocean, the Nazi machine is daily gathering momentum on a course that is already set for war. The plans are laid. The generals who opposed them have been replaced. The German Army has grown to fifty-one divisions, nine of them armored, after only four years—it took the old Imperial Army sixteen years before 1914 to build up from forty-three divisions to fifty. In the same period, the Luftwaffe has gone from nothing to twenty-one squadrons and two hundred sixty thousand men. And to back it all up, Hitler has the guarantee of support from an age that is fifty years ahead of even our own."

  "And what do we have to stop it? Let's plan for the worst, as we must, and assume that the return-gate situation won't change." Winslade spread his arms and swung his body left and right, appealing personally to every individual in the room. "Just ourselves—the even of us here, and Arthur Bannering back in England—to do what we can with a France that is surely lost to defeatism already, a tired and apathetic England, a cynical and suspicious Russia, and an American ostrich that doesn't yet understand the threat to be global." He shrugged and showed his empty palms again. "There will be nothing from 1975. No Kennedy with a prepared group waiting to take control, no military reinforcements, no advanced weapons as insurance against Hitler's atom bombs. We're on our own."

  Ferracini's mind reeled. At least nobody could accuse Claud of not telling things the way they were. That was Winslade's way, he had learned. Winslade would flatten people with the blackest of possible pictures, and then stand them back on their feet again, a piece at a time, in such a way that the only hope available was the one he was offering. That was how he had talked most of them into joining the mission in the first place.

  Gordon Shelby ran a hand through his wavy, black hair and looked across at Scholder. "It's definite, Kurt?" he said. "We really don't have any idea what's gone wrong?"

  "Well, we're not sure, anyway, Scholder replied, a curious note to his voice. "But we think there might be a way to shed more light on the mystery."

  Ferracini realized that a glint was creeping into Winslade's eyes. Suddenly, he recognized the familiar conjuring trick being worked again—all hope made to vanish in a puff of smoke by one hand, and then tantalizing hints given that something else was being concealed in the other. Anna Kharkiovitch had seen it, too. "What are you telling us, Claud," she demanded. "That there might still be something we can do after all—seriously? But where would we start? . . . There's so little time. . . ."

  Gordon Selby asked, "What did Kurt mean when he said there might be a way to shed more light on it? How? I thought Mortimer said yesterday that it looked as if we might need an Einstein or somebody to figure out what's happened."

  Winslade beamed suddenly. "Right on the nose, Gordon! So, we'll do that. Let's get Einstein in on it!"

  "What?" Selby blinked uncertainly.

  Winslade produced his rabbit. "He's just across the bay from here, at Princeton, isn't he? And the whole purpose of the mission was to make contact with Roosevelt and the present U.S. government, yes? Well, even if we can't put JFK on the line, we can still go ahead and talk to Roosevelt ourselves, anyway. And through him, we'd be in a position to get the entire U.S. scientific community working for us if we needed to."

  As if on cue, Greene came forward from the door and stood beside Winslade. "Construction work on the gate will be carried through to completion, which means you've all got plenty to do," he announced. "Major Warren will post new schedules and rosters later this afternoon. Are there any more questions in the meantime?"

  It was like a last-minute reprieve from a death sentence. All of a sudden, life seemed to have returned to normal as they had known it for the past five months. Everyone became talkative as a mood of relief and enthusiasm to get back to work took over.

  "How are we going to contact Einstein?" Payne asked.

  "We're not sure yet, Greene replied. "It's not simple. You can't get anywhere on the phone—the operators at Princeton have strict instructions about protecting his privacy. They get crank calls all the time."

  "Why not send him a letter like you did to Churchill?" Ryan suggested.

  "We're not sure if it would be reliable, Paddy," Winslade said. "Einstein really is the original absent-minded professor. He gets mountains of mail. Who knows who opens it, how much of it gets through to him personally, and what happens to half of what does? When he came to the States in '33, he missed having dinner at the White House because he never read the President's invitation."

  "You're kidding!"

  "No, really. Another time, he used a $1,500 prize-money check as a bookmark and lost both—the book and the check."

  "It might be better to approach Roosevelt first," Anna said.

  "We may have to," Winslade agreed. "But getting to the President isn't the easiest thing in the world, either. Churchill was accessible because he was a private citizen. But we are looking at various possibilities."

  Winslade's manner became more brisk. "Our other objective was to bring about an improvement in Europe's state of readiness. Since it now appears that, for the time being, anyway, we'll have to do without some of the resources we were counting on, a military alliance between the West and Russia is more important than ever. That was one of the reasons why Arthur stayed in England. Since politics with the Russians has suddenly become so important, we might end up sending you over there, too, Anna, to work with Arthur and Churchill. They're trying to get Anthony Eden sent to Moscow instead of Strang."

  In the Proteus world, the talks with Russia had deadlocked over the refusal of Poland, Rumania, and the Baltic states to allow passage of Russian troops through their borders, which made it difficult to talk seriously about Russia's aiding them against a Nazi attack. In an effort to move things, Molotov had requested Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Minister, to involve hims
elf personally. Halifax had declined, however, and sent instead a relatively junior Foreign Office official called Strang, who had limited negotiating powers and needed constantly to refer back to London for instructions.

  "That was why you left Arthur over there?" Anna asked, frowning.

  "Yes," Winslade replied.

  Anna's frown deepened. She knew that Winslade's directive from President Kennedy in the Proteus world hadn't said anything about trying to get Eden sent to Moscow in place of Strang. Therefore, the idea had to be something that Winslade had improvised on his own initiative. But if that was why he had left Bannering in London, then Winslade must have known that the gate wasn't going to work—or at least, he must have had a pretty good idea—even before he left to return to the States. Suddenly, Anna found herself wondering just how much more Winslade might know that he had been less than forthcoming about.

  When the meeting was over, Scholder and Major Warren stayed behind talking in the mess area, while Winslade and Mortimer Greene returned to the front office. Winslade closed the door, and Greene poured himself some coffee from the pot on the warmer in one corner. He stirred in a spoonful of sugar and sat down heavily at the desk. "I didn't expect it to go so well, Claud," he confessed. "It's nice to see you're not slipping." Winslade produced a cigar and looked absently at a large map of the world pinned to the wall. Greene sipped his coffee. "Do you think Einstein will be able to do anything?" He sounded dubious.

  "Who knows?" Winslade replied. "One thing I know for certain is that if you don't buy a ticket, you don't get a prize."

  The answer wasn't exactly comforting. "And if he can't help?" Greene asked.

  Winslade turned from the wall and peered down at Greene through his flat-topped spectacles. "Well, let's suppose for the sake of argument that he can't, he suggested. "How would you feel about it?"