Sure enough, she was—four days later, on August 26. To satisfy world opinion the British and French went ahead soon afterward with their declaration of the sham war against Germany which Hitler had been expecting. The Polish campaign was over by the month's end. Through it, Stalin sat tight and presented an impenetrable face, while behind the scenes his own preparations went ahead frantically. For now that the Germans and Russians were facing each other across a common border, there could no longer be any doubt what the Germans were preparing for, just as soon as Hitler extricated himself from his Western entanglement.
But now, in this world, it was still July. The sudden show of solidarity with the Russians might be enough to deter Hitler from launching the attack, Anna Kharkiovitch thought as she gazed at the gray, foam-flecked waters of the Bay of Biscay. But this would be the last opportunity to save the situation in Europe. Everything depended on its being seized and exploited vigorously.
Beside her, Gordon Selby closed the magazine that he had been thumbing idly. They had flown from Miami to Lisbon on Pan Am's newly inaugurated transatlantic Clipper passenger service, and stayed overnight at the Hotel Duas Nocas to await a connection to Poole, in Dorsetshire, on an Imperial Airways flying-boat from South Africa.
"You know, I think I've come to terms with it." Selby said, turning his head and leaning across to speak closer to her ear. After twelve hours in the air the day before, they had learned to be almost oblivious to the constant roar of four sixteen-cvlinder aero-engines. "If we do end up being stranded back here, we might be better off in the long run."
Anna nodded as if she had been expecting something like that. "And you're wondering if Claud knew it would happen."
Selby looked surprised. "How did you know?"
"I've been wondering, too."
"Well, what do you think?"
Anna studied his face. "Out of curiosity, what difference would it make to you?" she asked. "Do you have any ties that would make you want to go back?"
Selby shook his head. "None, really."
"No family or anything?"
"My parents were in the Congo when it was overrun and didn't get out fast enough—my father was a mining engineer there. Nobody ever found out what happened to them."
"How old were you then?"
"About twelve. I was back in the States when it happened, on school vacation. I finished growing up in an orphans' home and never got close to anybody. I wanted to be an engineer, though. It seemed . . . well, like away of respecting my dad, I guess. Maybe a psychiatrist would tell me that I ended up in nuclear engineering because of a subconscious desire to make bombs to throw back at them before it was all over."
Anna smiled. "You think so?"
"I don't know, but I cheered as loud as anybody when Kennedy stood up and said we were through with being pushed around."
"You see, it's the same with all of us," Anna said. "Nobody on the team has any compelling reason for wanting to go back, and everyone has a score to settle with Hitlerism. It's as if Claud picked us with that in mind."
Selby pursed his lips behind his black, pointed beard. "So, are you saying that Claud knew the gate wasn't going to work?" he asked.
"I don't know. Let's just say that I don't think he was taken completely by surprise. I believe he was hoping for the best, but he was prepared for the worst when it happened."
Selby nodded. "I know what you mean. Why did he pick the particular mix of people we've got, for example? Some good technicians and a couple of engineers would have been enough to assemble the gate. Were a historian and a diplomat necessary?"
"Exactly. And were all the military people necessary for security?" Anna asked. "Even if they were, why do they all just happen to be experienced in overseas undercover work, especially in Germany?"
The Sunderland droned on, and parts of the French coast came into view in the haze on the horizon ahead. After a minute or two of silence, Anna asked, "Does Claud want the gate to work, do you think? Or is this business about Einstein just a ploy to keep up morale until we've all adjusted to the idea of not going back?"
"You mean did he knowingly abandon a lost cause in our world for the chance of a different outcome here?"
"Yes—just that."
Selby thought for a while, then shook his head. "I don't think so. Sure, he was prepared for what's happened, but he'll do everything possible to get the connection working if he can. Claud can be objective and calculating when the job demands it, but he's human underneath. He wouldn't just leave our world to its fate, with complete disregard for the people in it who were relying on us."
"What makes you think that?"
"The fact that I'm here, on this plane."
"So?"
"My field is nuclear weapons, which is no doubt the reason I'm on the mission. If Claud's only interest were defeating Hitler in order to build a nice, comfortable world to live in, the most important thing would be to get an American A-bomb program moving, okay? Well, if that was what he wanted, I'd be back there helping to start it." Selby spread his hands briefly. "But Claud didn't do that. Instead he sent me over to Europe. Why? To get me out of the way for a while and make sure that the scientists back there aren't distracted from the thing he wants them to concentrate on, which can only be the gate. That says to me that he's serious about Einstein. I'm just the insurance in case it doesn't work and we end up having to make our own bomb."
Anna nodded and seemed relieved. "Yes," she agreed. "That was how I saw it, too. I was hoping so much that you'd say that."
They lapsed into silence for a while. Then Selby looked up from his magazine again and said, "What about Cassidy, though? He's got a reason for wanting to go back."
Anna turned her head. "Because of that girl he talks about? Oh, you can't take that too seriously. You know what Cassidy's like."
"You don't think he is engaged, then?"
"Quite possibly he is, or maybe was, once. . . . But do you really think it would be so much of a tragedy if they didn't go through with it?"
Selby rubbed his nose with a knuckle and grinned faintly. "I guess not. But then the whole thing was bizarre from the beginning. I mean, Cassidy's okay in his own way, but he can be a bum. How did he ever get mixed up with a family like hers anyway?"
"Bum?"
Selby tossed his hands up in a candid gesture. "Well, he is, isn't he? Let's be honest."
Anna looked at him curiously for a few seconds. "You don't really know Cassidy, do you, Gordon?"
"Why, what's there to know?"
"He comes from one of the wealthiest families in the southwest—the direct heir to an oil and minerals fortune. But he despised the people around him for living lives of luxurious banality at a time when the country had its back to the wall, so he walked out and became a plain trooper in the Army. As you said, Claud would never have picked the kind of jerk that Cassidy sometimes pretends to be."
Selby stared at her in astonishment. "How do you know about it?" he asked.
"Harry told me the story after we arrived in New Mexico—we were driving into Albuquerque in one of the trucks for something or other. I'd been a bit hard on Cassidy over something, and Harry wanted to straighten the situation out. Those two work well together."
That would have been typical, Selby thought. Harry wasn't the team's greatest talker, but for some reason it seemed natural for him to have confided something like this to Anna. "Hmm, strange," he remarked. "You seem to have a knack for getting along with the troops."
"It's not really strange," Anna told him. "When I was younger, I fought with the Siberian partisans for five years before I got out. I'd killed ten Nazis by the time I was seventeen. When I was eighteen, an SS colonel ordered all the men in my family's village to be shot. I went to bed with him so that I could cut his throat while he was asleep. You see, Gordon, Special Operations soldiers and I speak the same language."
Back at Gatehouse, Professor George Pegram, head of the Physics Department and Dean of the Graduate Schools a
t Columbia, had collapsed weakly into one of the chairs in the mess area, stunned from the things he had learned in the last sixty minutes. Winslade, Greene, Scholder, and others from the Proteus team, along with the three Hungarian physicists, were standing and sitting in various positions nearby. Pegram had been out of town, and over a week had gone by since Szilard's first frantic phone calls from Gatehouse to Teller and Wigner.
"Before you recover your wits, George, yes, we know there are seemingly impossible logical contradictions," Szilard said. "But trying to grapple with them at this stage would be futile. Take it from me—I've tried. We all have. So has Lindemann over in England. It needs a different kind of approach, a mind with a knack for questioning the obvious and for seeing the problem from the angle that everyone else misses. That's why we want Einstein."
"More than just Einstein," Winslade said from where he was standing in the middle of the floor. "According to our original plan, the President and certain members of the government should already have become involved. I don't see any reason why a technical hitch should justify delaying that any further, especially since we may find we need access to all kinds of resources that a word from the White House could unlock."
"In short, we approach the President through Einstein," Teller said to Pegram.
Pegram blinked dazedly, shook his head, and at last found his voice. "Yes, I can see what you're saying. But why not go to Roosevelt direct in the first place?"
"Think about it, George," Wigner suggested. "Fermi and Tuve were thrown out as cranks when they tried a direct approach to the government, just to get backing for fission research. Do you really want to be the one to go back and tell them we're into time machines now?"
Pegram nodded glumly. Wigner was right. Szilard had received a letter only a few days earlier, politely but firmly turning down their second attempt at interesting the Navy. "Einstein's prestige would carry the right weight," Pegram agreed. "But how is he going to get the message to Roosevelt? I mean, with all due respect to him, could we rely on him to carry out a job like that? You've heard the stories. . . ."
"I have negotiated suitable arrangements already," Szilard said, sounding just a little officious. "Gustav Stolper, the Austrian economist, recently introduced me to somebody called Alexander Sachs, who's an economics consultant to the Lehman Corporation and also a personal friend of the President's. I've talked to Sachs, and he has agreed to deliver a letter to Roosevelt personally, signed by Einstein."
Pegram looked aghast. "You've talked to him already? For God's sake, Leo, we can't allow information of this kind to—"
"Oh, of course, I didn't tell him anything about Proteus or the machine here," Szilard said impatiently. "We're using uranium research and the possibility of a fission bomb as a cover story. The real subject will be divulged later, only to Roosevelt in person."
Pegram looked at Winslade. "You're happy about this, Claud?"
"Oh, yes. Leo was kind enough to clear it with us before he said anything to Sachs," Winslade replied.
There was nothing more to be said. Pegram looked around one more time and then nodded. "Very well, let's go and talk to Einstein. Can you arrange a meeting in Princeton, Leo?"
"He's not there," Szilard replied. "The last I heard was that he's rented a cabin or something somewhere and gone off to sail his boat. So, first we'll have to find him."
And so it came about that on Sunday, July 30, 1939, while Teller and Pegram were at Gatehouse with Greene studying the construction of the machine, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner found themselves driving with Winslade and Scholder in Wigner's car, looking for a summer house belonging to a Dr. Moore, somewhere in the vicinity of Peconic, Long Island.
CHAPTER 19
IT WAS PAST 3:00 A.M., and Stan Shaw, "your very good friend, the Milkman," was babbling a cheerful news bulletin between commercials on WNEW's all-night radio program. Ferracini was dozing, chin on his chest and chair tilted back to rest his feet on the large table in the center of the mess area. Cassidy was sprawled in an armchair behind a newspaper, and Floyd Lamson was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall by the coffeepot, whittling an owl from a piece of wood to add to the collection of animal forms that was beginning to adorn the room. The rest of the team at Gatehouse were either asleep or with Einstein and the other visitors, who were still examining the machine.
Ferracini was picturing again the house that he had lived in as a boy, a yellow-painted wooden house with a brown shingled roof, near the gas station that one of his Uncle Frank's brothers owned. He remembered Frank, lean and muscular, coming home from the construction jobs he worked on across the river in Manhattan and talking over dinner about ball games and plans for fishing trips. When the news in the papers was bad, he talked about the things the Nazis were doing in Asia and Africa. Aunt Teresa would become very quiet when Frank talked about things like that.
In the evening, Frank and Harry would sometimes listen to a fight on the radio, with Frank blocking and jabbing to the commentary as he followed the action blow by blow. Some nights he would shower, change, and pack his kit to go to one of the clubs where he boxed himself, or watched a match. On those nights, sometimes, Aunt Teresa used to sit down with Harry by the fireside and tell stories about the old days in Italy before Mussolini and the Fascists.
Life then sounded so simple and carefree, with lots of singing, dancing, and weddings in the village church. The world had seemed to be just a small community of relatives, friends, and familiar faces such as Father Buivento, Luigi the Mayor, Dino the wagonmaker, Rodolfo the dairyman, and more whom Ferracini could still picture from his childhood imaginings. His fantasies had mirrored the security and contentment of the age at which he had created them; sometimes, in harsher moments of later years—waiting inside a troop carrier to parachute out into the Greenland night during arctic training, maybe, or lying motionless for hours on an Alpine ridge while search parties with dogs combed the slopes below—he had thought back wistfully to that make-believe world of warmth and caring where everybody knew everybody and all had a place to belong.
Now, strangely, he felt he had found something very close to that in the New York of 1939. The remoteness from their own times was forging a bond among the members of the team that made them seem like a family in many ways; and the circle of regulars at Max's, the Indian restaurant upstairs, Mooney's bar along the block, the pool parlor across the street, and other places that Ferracini was getting to know had a friendly familiarity that was a new experience to him.
Back in January, he remembered, he had felt contempt for the America that he had found existing before the holocaust years of the forties; but something in his perceptions had changed since then. Although Roosevelt's New Deal had included its share of failures and miscalculations, it had nevertheless succeeded in inspiring the nation with the determination it needed to help itself. And the nation, responding with rugged optimism, had pulled itself through the economic blizzard of the thirties, its basic human values of compassion and respect for individual freedom still intact. It had avoided succumbing to the forces of tyranny, hatred, mob-rule, and violence, which the same problems had unleashed across Europe. Ferracini was beginning to think that there was something to be proud of and a lot that was worth preserving in a people who could do that.
"Says here that with good behavior, and providing he pays the twenty grand he owes, Alphonse Capone'll be eligible for release from jail in November," Cassidy announced over the paper that he was reading.
"Where's he at?" Lamson asked from his position on the floor.
"Some place called Terminal Island off San Pedro, California."
"Well, I hope he behaves himself and stays in line this time, Lamson drawled. "Otherwise, we might have to teach him some manners, too, like Bruno." He set down his knife and turned the wooden owl in his hands to inspect it. "What kind of rap did they get him on in the end?" he asked.
"Forgot to mail his taxes," Cassidy said.
Lamson shook his head re
provingly. "Didn't make his protection payments, huh? Well, I guess that's what happens."
At that moment, the door leading to the machine area opened softly, and Einstein appeared. Cassidy put down his paper. Ferracini took his feet off the table and sat up. Lamson set aside his owl and rose awkwardly to his feet. Einstein held up a hand and seemed apologetic for the intrusion.
"Please, any need to disturb yourselves, there is not," he said in his quaint, heavily accented English as he came in and shuffled across to the table. "I am looking to get the cup of tea, if possible. Back there, politics they are all talking—such a dreary subject, even for one who understands, which I do not pretend to. So I ask where the bathroom is, and I sneak away." He winked conspiratorially at Ferracini and whispered behind a raised hand, "I can always tell them I get lost trying to find the way back. It's amazing what you can get away with when you're supposed to be absent-minded."
Although he had, by this time, acquired a snowy halo of wispy hair, Einstein was noticeably younger than the image depicted in the better-known photographs of later years. He had a high forehead, dimpled cheeks, and a stubborn chin. His eyelids drooped downward at the sides, and in combination with his ragged mustache, would have given his face something of the look of a sad walrus, were it not for his bright eyes and the mischievous half-smile playing around his mouth. He was wearing a frayed brown sweater and shapeless pants, and had arrived with Szilard and Wigner early in the evening.
The others eyed each other uncertainly for a few awkward seconds. "Tea," Lamson mumbled. "We got some hot water here. Don't know about any tea, though. . . ."
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