The Proteus Operation

by James P. Hogan

  Wigner stared dubiously. "Are you sure?"

  "Here are the notes you made. It's as they describe."

  "This becomes more and more peculiar."

  Wigner eased the car forward again, and they parked before the large doors at the front of the warehouse. Teller looked around warily as they got out; nobody was in sight. Then the small door set into one of the larger ones opened, and a figure in a crumpled jacket, loosely knotted tie, and gray flannel pants stepped out. He was broad and stockily built and had a heavily jowled face with a solid chin, high browline, and wide mouth. It was Szilard.

  Two men were with him. The first was tall, dark-chinned, and unsmiling, and wore baggy corduroy pants with a plaid shirt and brown leather cap. Szilard introduced him as Major Harvey Warren, U.S. Army. Wigner glanced at Teller apprehensively. Although Szilard was a first-rate scientist capable of some dazzling insights, he was known among his peers for leaps of imagination which at times could border on the reckless. Teller wondered if maybe Szilard had really let the strain get to him this time. The other man had a pinkish complexion and thin white hair, and his eyes twinkled mirthfully behind quaint half-round spectacles. He was soberly, but meticulously dressed in a plain, dark gray suit with striped shirt, silver tie with a red lion motif, and jeweled clip. His name, Szilard said, was Claud Winslade. He was "with the government."

  They entered the warehouse and crossed a bay in which several trucks and other vehicles were parked, then ascended a short stairway to the loading dock. Here they met Mortimer Green, a man in his fifties, with a bald head fringed by graying hair at the back and sides, and clipped mustache. Winslade described him as "also a scientist"; with him was another man, frail, with a deeply lined face and close-cropped gray hair. His name was Kurt Scholder; he, too, was a scientist, apparently. He spoke with a discernible German accent. "Where are you from?" Teller asked curiously.

  "Dortmund, originally."

  "I know it vaguely. When did you come to America?"

  Scholder smiled mysteriously. "I think we should leave that question until a little later." he said. They moved on.

  In the dim light farther back from the loading dock, Wigner and Teller could see nothing but bales and crates stacked high into the darkness below the roof. Major Warren led the way around a protruding wall of boxes into a narrow passage between the stacks, and then around another bend; it was like being in a military trench system, Teller thought to himself. And then a section of what had looked like a dead-end wall of crates swung aside to reveal itself as a camouflaged door—and a sturdily built door at that, they could see as they passed through.

  Suddenly, they were in a completely different world of clean, painted, partition walls, false ceilings, and bright lights. Teller and Wigner turned instinctively as the door swung shut behind them, and saw to their astonishment that not only the door, but all of the rearmost stacks of crates formed a facade screening a false wall that reached up to the roof. Nearby, a partly enclosed room opened out to where they were standing. Winslade walked over to it and beckoned for them to follow.

  Inside stood a desk and a couple of chairs; some charts and tables were pinned to one wall, and a rack containing automatic weapons was affixed to the wall opposite. But what attracted the attention of the two newcomers was the bank of instrumentation cabinets and electronic equipment standing on a table at the back. They walked up to it and gazed in amazement.

  The front panels were compact and elegantly styled, unlike the ugly and cluttered fronts of the black boxes they were familiar with. In addition to recognizable devices like switches and buttons, the panels contained other things that were new: luminous screens displaying lines of text; windows containing glowing numbers; two spools wound with some kind of ribbon behind a small glass door; a telephone handset of strange, streamlined design. Some of the rectangular screens were showing pictures: the loading dock they had just come from, other interior views that meant nothing, and a series of scenes from outside the building. Teller had seen some examples of experiments with "television" while he was in England, but never anything as clear as this.

  Winslade operated a control on one of the consoles and indicated a screen that was showing a portion of the roadway outside. The view began changing, sweeping slowly by to cover all approaches as the camera moved. He keyed something into one of the arrays of buttons, and a screen that had been blank came to life to show Wigner's car stopping a short distance away, then turning and coming forward to park, and finally Wigner and Teller getting out and walking up to the door. "Terrible manners, I know, but sometimes these things are necessary," Winslade commented cheerfully.

  In one corner was some shelving carrying an assortment of boxes, tools, reels of cable, and what looked like strange kinds of electrical components and subassemblies. Szilard picked something up and thrust it into Wigner's hand. It was a thin board of some greenish, translucent substance, covered on one side by a pattern of metallic lines and shapes, and on the other by several rows of small, black, rectangular capsules and an arrangement of colored disklike and rodlike objects. Szilard pointed at one of the black capsules. "That's the equivalent of a whole electrical cabinet, Eugene!" he exclaimed. "It contains microscopic configurations of silicon crystal—equivalent to thousands of vacuum tubes—more than you could get in the room!" Wigner turned the board over in his hands and stared at it, nonplussed. Teller shook his head incredulously.

  "What does it do?" Winslade asked for them. "Oh, things like this, for example." He moved forward and tapped at a typewriterlike keyboard. The screen in front of him activated to read, COMMAND MODE. Winslade entered the word BASIC, which appeared letter by letter as he typed. Evidently he was writing direct to the screen. The questions MEM ALLOC? and FILES?, whatever they meant, followed, and to each he tapped in a response. It was uncanny. Winslade was actually interacting—conducting a dialogue—with the machine.

  Finally the word READY appeared, and Winslade typed RUN "TICK TACK." A moment later, the heading WELCOME TO COMPUTER TICK TACK TOE appeared at the top of the screen, and below it the familiar grid. At the bottom, a caption advised I'LL PLAY "O." YOU PLAY "X," and asked WHOSE MOVE FIRST? (Y/M). Winslade typed Y, and at once an O filled one of the corner boxes.

  "Care to try your game?" Winslade asked, turning to face his two speechless guests. "Or would you prefer chess?"

  "And this is just trivial!" Szilard interjected, waving his hands at the other two excitedly. "It can calculate—algebraic and trig functions, hyperbolics, matrices, whatever you want—in seconds! It remembers information—anything. You can recall things and change things in an instant. It can draw pictures—graphs, functions, shapes. It practically understands English!"

  Neither Teller nor Wigner could form a coherent question just at that moment. Winslade looked from one to another for a few seconds, not without some amusement, and then said, "Leo is right. This is a triviality. You will be wondering, of course, who we are, what we are doing here, and how it comes to concern yourselves. Excuse my taking something of a liberty like this, but I'm sure that when you know the answers you'll agree this was the quickest way to avoid a lot of tedious questions and possible misunderstandings. Follow me if you will, gentlemen."

  He led them to a door that led through a high partition extending almost from one side of the building to the other. On the far side they stopped dead, their mouths hanging open and eyes wide with disbelief.

  In front of them was an enormous machine unlike anything either of them had even seen. Its general form was a cylinder eight to ten feet in diameter, lying horizontally in a heavy steel framework with its underside about six feet up from the floor and the near end almost over their heads. The other end disappeared into a tangle of pipes and cables, immense electrical windings, contoured yoke-pieces, and ancillary latticework, making it impossible to judge its length. More machinery and electrical equipment filled the spaces in the framework beneath. An overhead railed platform, reached by several steel ladders leading u
p from the floor at various places, projected from the side of the cylinder and ran completely around it at its mid-height level. Teller had seen some strange experimental apparatus in laboratories on both sides of the Atlantic, and machinery employed by all kinds of industries, but never anything like this. Its purpose was unimaginable.

  They followed a narrow walkway along the floor below the machine, between workbenches, boxes, metal housings, and cubicles, stepping over tubes and cable runs, and ducking their heads to avoid supporting struts and girders. As they picked their way through toward the rear of the building, Winslade remarked casually on some of the things around them. "Superconducting magnets generating fifty thousand gauss. The windings are kept at four degrees Kelvin by liquid helium, and carry up to forty thousand amperes per square centimeter. Not bad, eh?"

  "Waveguides transmitting electromagnetic energy at microwave frequencies—gigacycles per second. Just what you'd need for an echo-principle aircraft detection system."

  They reached the end forty feet farther on, where the cylinder terminated in a steel, boxlike construction facing out over a wide end-section of the railed platform. An opening the size of a garage doorway led into the box, and blocks, chains, and lifting tackle hung from the roof above.

  At the rear of the building, they left the space housing the machine and went through a door in another partition to find themselves in a suddenly more domestic and homey setting of closets and easy chairs, a table with cards scattered on top, the smell of cooking wafting from not far away, books, magazines, a coffeepot in one corner, and a radio turned low. Two more men were waiting here, and Winslade introduced them as Captain Payne and Sergeant Lamson, both, like Major Warren, from the Army. The group comprised a dozen persons, all told, Winslade said, but the others were elsewhere at that moment.

  "So who are we, and what do we want?" Winslade swung round to face Teller and Wigner squarely. "We can help with many of the problems that you are involved with currently. For example, you, Eugene, are working with Leo, trying to answer a lot of questions concerning neutron moderators. Graphite seems suitable, but you need to know the path-length for slowing fission neutrons down to the right energy for capture. He looked at Teller. "But for an explosive device, will concentrated U-235 chain-react with fast neutrons? If so, what critical mass would be required, and how rapidly would it have to be assembled? I could go on."

  Teller looked thunderstruck. "Now, just a minute," he whispered in a horrified voice. "How do you know what problems we are working on? This is a—a highly sensitive area. I . . ." He shook his head and looked at Wigner. "I don't understand. What's going on?"

  "I don't know, Edward." Wigner was looking just as lost.

  He turned back toward Winslade. "Who are you? What department of the government are you from?" he demanded.

  Szilard had been bottling up his emotions for as long as he was able. "That's a time machine out there!" he shouted, hopping from one foot to another and jabbing his finger in the direction they had come from. "They're not from anywhere in this world at all. They've come back from the future—back from 1975!"

  Teller looked at Wigner. Wigner looked at Teller. They both looked at Szilard, then at Winslade, and finally back at each other. "He's gone mad," Teller said in a flat voice. But at the same time there was a curious undertone hinting that he already half believed it. The look in Wigner's eyes said the same thing.

  Winslade nodded. "Yes, we are from the future," he said. "Therefore, naturally, we know something of your work. But we have our problems, too. The machine out there is called a return-gate. Its function is to establish a return connection to our own times, via which information and objects may be transmitted. It has been constructed to specification and operates correctly according to all our test procedures, but we are unable to make contact with the 1975 end. The situation is especially strange because we appeared to have made contact successfully with this end before we left." Winslade spread his hands and shrugged. "We want to know what's gone wrong."

  CHAPTER 17

  THE VAST MILITARY BUREAUCRACY that directed and administered the German war machine was centralized in a group of massive, imposing buildings lying along Bendlerstrasse, in Berlin. On a corner of Bendlerstrasse and a stone quay fronting the Landwehr Canal, the Ministry of Defense stood behind a classically columned facade approached by broad stone steps. Farther along the street lay the Headquarters of the Army General Staff, its gray fieldstone complex stretching back almost as far as the landscaped meadows and lakes of the Tiergarten. Numbers 72-76 of what was called Tirpitz Ufer, a roadway by one of the side canals, belonged to the austere, five-storey granite edifice that was headquarters of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service.

  In an office situated at a corner of the building on the third floor, two floors below the office of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the department's chief, Lieutenant-Colonel Joachim Boeckel read a routine copy of a report that had come through from the Bremen branch, which handled most of the espionage and general intelligence information from the United States. The report was from a former Baltic ferry master of the Stettin, Malmo, and Copenhagen runs, who, although he had been living in the New York area for five years now, was still a loyal Nazi and eager to further the cause. He was still in the sailing business and had acquired a sizable boat, and Berlin had stayed in touch because of his knowledge of local waters and potential usefulness in getting other agents ashore in times to come if the need arose. His name was Walther Fritsch. Lately, it seemed, he had run into problems with some criminals who wanted to use his boat.

  Boeckel smiled and looked up to call his trim and shapely, raven-haired secretary, tapping at a battered typewriter behind a paper-strewn desk in the opposite corner. "Hey, Hildegarde, listen to this. Do you remember Grand-Admiral Walther, who sends us snippets from America?"

  Hildegarde stopped typing. "Oh, yes, the one with the boat. What's he done now?"

  "Roosevelt and the Jews must be onto him," Boeckel said. "They've sent in their underworld to rub him out."

  "Are you being serious?"

  Boeckel grinned. "Apparently, some gangster was trying to pressure him into handing over his boat for some reason or other. Poor Walther got a bit roughed up. That niece who moved over with him was involved, too."

  "Was it bad?"

  "Oh, no, he's all right. But he talks here about a mysterious band of black-clad desperadoes who materialized from nowhere, stormed the house in which he and the girl were being held, vanquished the villains, and got them out. It even made the New York papers—here's a clipping. Ever hear a story like that before?"

  Hildegarde regarded him dubiously from beneath long, black eyelashes. "Lots of times." she said. "Do you think he's very . . . stable?"

  "Oh, it's wildly exaggerated, no doubt of that," Boeckel said. "Probably he got himself mixed up in a feud between rival gangs or something. But you're right—the strain might be getting to him. . . ." He frowned and added absently, "We might need him for some quite important operations one day. I do hope we can trust his reliability."

  Hildegarde came round her desk to open one of the filing cabinets near Boeckel. "American decadence is getting to him," she said as she stooped to consult a document inside one of the folders.

  Boeckel looked approvingly at the curves of her body through her crisp white blouse and black skirt. He patted her behind and allowed his fingers to linger lasciviously for a moment. Hildegarde tutted reproachfully, but didn't move.

  "Can I take you to dinner tonight?" Boeckel asked. "Hoeffner's again, maybe? You liked the band there."

  "But not the people."

  Boeckel shrugged. "Okay. Then somewhere else."

  "Hmm . . . something tells me that you've more than just dinner in mind."

  "What could possibly give you such an idea?"

  "Oh, young, handsome lieutenant-colonels are all the same."

  "Really? And how might you know?"

  "Never mind."

  "Very
well, I admit it. Boeckel tossed up his hands. "So, what's wrong with good, old-fashioned, German decadence?"

  Hildegarde smiled as she went back to her chair and sat down. "I can meet you after seven," she said. "But don't act so presumptuously. It's not nice to be taken for granted." Boeckel initialed the report on his desk and tossed it across to her. "What do you want me to do with it?" Hildegarde asked.

  "Well, let's not dismiss it too offhandedly. Put it in the carry-forward file to come out for review, oh, say two months from now. We'll see what else has happened then. But if you ask me, Hildegarde, I think you're right—it's the American culture. Our friend the grand-admiral has been reading too many Superman comics and allowing his imagination to be carried away by them."

  CHAPTER 18

  NEWS CAME FROM ARTHUR Bannering in England of what at last seemed like a significant alteration of events: Chamberlain had agreed to the demands the Russians had been pressing for high-level military talks on concrete defense measures.

  In the Proteus team's previous world, the British and French governments had persistently declined this proposal because of their reluctance to divulge military secrets without a political treaty; on the other hand, as evidenced by their choice of Strang to go to Moscow, they had been in no great hurry to conclude any treaty. This had confirmed Stalin's suspicions and strengthened his resolve not to be drawn into a Polish commitment, which would have been purely academic in any case, since the Poles had remained just as determined not to allow Russian troops through their territory. This had given the British Cabinet its excuse not to pursue the defense treaty with the Russians: they had shown themselves before the eyes of the world to have been willing, and it would be Poland's own fault now if she were invaded.