The Proteus Operation

by James P. Hogan

  A puzzled frown crossed Boeckel's face. "She's gone, sir. She was transferred to Hamburg."

  "She was?" Piekenbrock managed to look genuinely surprised. "Oh, yes, I'd forgotten. Well, behave yourself with her replacement."

  "That won't be difficult," Boeckel said glumly. "They've given me a hag who's at least fifty. She's as fat as a carthorse and has bad breath."

  Piekenbrock strolled on, admiring the patterns of snow on the trees and avoiding his subordinate's suspicious glances. "Did they really? Oh, well, these things happen, I suppose. Isn't that just too bad."

  On January 10, an incident occurred that had not taken place in the Proteus team's universe: Two German officers made a forced landing at Menchelen, in Belgium, after their plane strayed off course. They were carrying copies of the German plan of attack in the West, which took the form of a thrust through the Low Countries as the Allied commanders had anticipated, and which the Proteus team's history confirmed.

  The German planning staff had been urging Hitler to delay the attack because of the continuing atrocious weather— again, a departure from events in the Proteus universe, where conditions had been less severe. With the loss of the plans, Hitler conceded and ordered the campaign in the West to be postponed until spring.

  Hitler also decided that adhering to the captured plan would be too risky and called for a new one to be drawn up. He began paying close attention to a scheme that General von Manstein, the new commander of the XXXIII Army Corps, had been urging for a fast-moving armored thrust through the Ardennes, far south of the originally proposed points of attack. The French considered the area impassable to tanks and hadn't committed much of their strength to its defense. Even if the Germans did attack in that region, the French reasoned, they would need six or seven days to bring up their heavy artillery—ample time for the French reserves to move into covering positions.

  Von Manstein agreed with these calculations. Therefore, he wasn't proposing to use heavy artillery; he would use ground-attack bombers, instead.

  CHAPTER 32

  DIVING AND THE USE of scuba equipment were part of the basic training of all Special Operations troops; so were parachuting, skiing, mountaineering, and travel across all types of terrain from arctic icefields to tropical jungles—in short, just about every means available for carrying warfare to an enemy. Furthermore, Paddy Ryan, in an another coincidence that Winslade refused to comment on, had previously been an instructor at the Navy's Underwater Reconnaissance & Demolition training base in Florida. Hence, none of the Ampersand group who arrived at the submarine school in the second week of January needed any introduction to flippers, masks, wet suits, dry suits, or underwater breathing apparatus. After a day's practice to refresh basic skills, therefore, they were able to devote the rest of the time to the main object of their stay at Portsmouth: learning to use the special equipment, both consignments of which had arrived safely from New York via Liverpool.

  Each suit consisted of an inner and an outer garment. The body-hugging inner was made of soft sponge rubber to trap bubbles of insulating air close to the skin, covered by a layer of treated flannel. The outer was a hooded, tight-fighting suit made from double-thickness oilskin impregnated with paraffin wax. The design was based on underwater dress as it had developed by the 1970s, but with the added features of gloves and overgauntlets attaching at watertight wrist seals, tighter-sealing face masks, and hard outer helmets, colored for ease of identification.

  The aims were not only to prevent all contact with the surrounding medium and to afford good heat insulation, but also to minimize the spread of liquid inside the suit if a leak did develop—the rate at which fluid under pressure could penetrate even a pinhole was surprising. And if the contents of the mineshaft were corrosive and somebody suffered a major gash? Well, that was one of the reasons why the person picked as medical officer, Ed Payne, just happened to have specialized in chemical burns.

  Unlike regular scuba gear, which supplied compressed air from backpack tanks, respiration was effected by means of an oxygen rebreathing system worn on the chest, far less bulky and unlikely to prove a hindrance in confined spaces. In addition, the suits were equipped with saturated magnetic-reactor telephones, which required no cords and functioned like radios up to distances of a few hundred feet; they were compact and required no electronics or heavy batteries.

  Some of the concepts employed were novel by the standards of 1940; for example, one-piece face masks instead of goggles that squeezed eyes uncomfortably at depth, and on-demand regulator valves delivering air at the pressure of the working depth to inflate the lungs against the weight of the overlying water. Care had been taken, however, to exclude any totally implausible innovations. Thus, any equipment falling into German hands might cause a few raised eyebrows, but it would be unlikely to arouse further suspicions.

  "Well, the way I figure it has to be is like this," Cassidy said, sitting forward and lifting his leg onto one of the cross-girders to adjust part of his harness. "You know what Kurt said about all these universes branching off from each other every time an atom flips its lid, or whatever he said they do?"

  "Uh-huh." Ferracini, clad in his own suit except for its face mask, leaned out from their perch on the steel-lattice gantry spanning the top of the fifty-foot-deep escape tank, and looked down at the muddy brown surface of the water six feet below. Major Warren and Captain Payne were on a wider platform in the middle of the gantry, from which a set of lines disappeared down to where Lamson and Ryan were demolishing obstructions at the bottom. The water in the tank had been dyed opaque brown to simulate the liquids at the bottom of the shaft at Weissenberg, and the team was having to learn to work by feel and communicate via a system of touch signals instead of the divers usual hand signs. Payne had commented that the color was appropriate to Claud's quip about armadillos.

  "And every universe is a possible version of what might have happened, somehow different from all the others," Cassidy went on.

  Ferracini nodded. "That's the way it sounded to me, anyhow."

  "Okay, so once two branches divide and go separate ways, they can never merge again, right? In other words, once two versions of a past exist that are different in some way, they can't lead you to the same future, okay?"

  "I dunno. . . . Well, maybe. . . . What is this, Cassidy? Since when have you—"

  "Shuddup a minute, Harry, this makes sense. Now—"

  "Well, excuse me."

  "Sure, but now think about this. If you build a machine that sends people or a message—anything—back into the past, it has to create a new branch—in fact, a whole new tree of branches that begins right at the instant that the whatever-it-is appears. Now, all of those new branches have to be different from the line that was already there and led to the future that the whatever-it-is came from. They have to be different because they've got a whatever-it-is on them—like a machine in Germany back in 1925, for instance—and the line that was already there doesn't have. Therefore, anyone who comes back through that machine can't do anything to change what's on the line that was already there because the line he's on now—the new line—leads someplace else up the new tree.

  "Wait a minute . . ." Ferracini held up a hand while he thought over what Cassidy said. "Okay, so . . ."He stopped, and his eyes widened.

  Cassidy nodded vigorously before Ferracini could say any more. "That's right. Overlord must have known at least that much, seeing as how they figured out the original system and all that. So, any idea of them thinking they could change their own situation by setting up Hitler to take out the Soviets is baloney. They'd have known that nothing they did could change anything to do with where they were at."

  "So what did Overlord think they were achieving?" Ferracini asked, puzzled.

  Cassidy shrugged. "All I can think of is that they didn't figure they'd change their own universe, but set up a new one that suited them better. Then they'd pack their bags, move in, and take it over."

  "You mean after Hitler h
ad gotten rid of the Soviets and set it up for them?"

  "Exactly—except that he had other ideas and shut down his end of the connection before they made their move."

  And that was where the world he had grown up in had come from. Ferracini couldn't fault the reasoning. Slowly, a frown crept over his face as he thought about what it meant. "Are you saying that Claud must have known about it, too— that he's been holding out?"

  "Either that or he got it wrong," Cassidy said.

  "Claud doesn't usually get too much wrong."

  "That's what I figured."

  "But if Claud knew, then . . ."

  "If he knew, then he'd have known also that the same applied to our universe," Cassidy completed. "Nothing we do here can change the situation that JFK and the rest of them are In hack there. All we can affect is the future of the branch we're on now."

  On the platform behind them, Payne said something into his telephone and looked over his shoulder at Warren. "Ryan says they're done. They're coming back up now."

  Ferracini and Cassidy collected tools and other items in preparation for going down next. "So what are you saying?" Ferracini asked. "That Claud had the same idea—our world had no future worth talking about, so he decided to transfer to another one that had more going for it?"

  "If you were him, which one would you rather retire in?" Cassidy asked.

  "I'll tell you when I've got a better idea where this one's leading."

  "But at least it's got chances. See my point?"

  Ferracini stood up and thought about it while he fastened lines, knife, and tool belt, making sure that everything was tied and buckled such that it could be released instantly if it got caught in something. "So how come he never told anybody?" he said at last.

  Cassidy spread his hands in a what-else-do-you-expect? gesture, "if we're stuck here, we're stuck, but if it does turn out to be true, how many of us honestly feel now that it would be such a lousy deal? We've had a year to get used to this place, and it could be a lot worse. Now that we're all adjusting, Claud doesn't talk too much about Gatehouse, anymore— hadn't you noticed? He talks about Hammerhead. See what I mean? It's what happens to this world that he's interested in, not the one we came from."

  "Einstein and all those scientists back there with Mortimer and Kurt—are you saying it was all a waste of time from the start? Claud knew it was?"

  "I'm not sure, Cassidy admitted. "But let me ask you this: Would you have had anything to do with this mission if you'd known for a fact before we left that it was gonna be a oneway ticket?"

  At the end of the week, Winslade came down from London to see how things were going. He showed up looking like a nineteenth-century English squire, in checked tweed suit, complete with topcoat, shoulder-length cape, deerstalker hat, and smoking a curved briar pipe. He announced that from the latest intelligence reports the German attack might not materialize at the end of January, after all. The improvement in Allied resolve might be part of the reason; the weather could have something to do with it. Nobody was sure. But in any case, the Allied plan was to meet a German thrust as far forward as possible by advancing into Belgium at the first sign of a German move westward.

  There was a lot of popular support for Finland, still putting up a good fight against the Russians. The Norwegian and Swedish governments, however, were balking at the thought of granting the Allies passage to render any aid. The British, for their part, now that war had come, had no qualms at the implied prospect of fighting the Soviet Union in addition to the Nazis.

  "They've taken the view that Stalin is as bad as Hitler, and if they're going to get rid of one, they might as well get rid of the other while they're at it," Winslade said. That the opposition the British were talking about taking on was more than ten times the population of their tiny island didn't seem to bother them at all.

  CHAPTER 33

  ON THE LAST DAY of January, the scientists at Gatehouse again made a crude contact with the 1975 system by establishing what Scholder described as a "partial resonance." This happened five weeks after the first occurrence, which had taken place on Christmas Eve. There had been delays in getting some of the redesigned components delivered; others had had to be scrapped and reordered, and progress in general had not been spectacular. Scholder repeated his attempt to attract attention at the far end by Morse transmission, but nothing new was accomplished. Greene telephoned the news to Winslade as a matter of course, and Winslade asked to be informed immediately of any further developments.

  In Europe, the German assault in the West that had overwhelmed France and led to Britain's defeat in the previous universe failed to materialize. By the end of the first few clays of February, those with inside knowledge who had been anxiously following the situation concluded that the invasion wasn't coming. At last, the strengthened Allied determination seemed to have shown results and altered the course of history for the better.

  Reassured and emboldened, Churchill and his followers stepped up their pressure for action to forestall the Nazi move into Scandinavia, which in the Proteus world had taken place in May. Accordingly, on February 5, the Allied Supreme War Council decided upon intervention in Norway. The plan adopted followed closely the lines that Winslade had outlined at Churchill's flat in November, namely that the public justification would be to aid Finland, while the government would believe that the real objective was to cut off Germany's iron-ore supply from Sweden.

  On February 16, the British destroyer Cossack, acting on direct orders from Churchill, sailed into a Norwegian fjord to apprehend the German ship Altmark. Although the Norwegians were supposed to have searched the Altmark and had reported negatively, Admiralty intelligence held that the ship carried British seamen taken prisoner by the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, which had later scuttled itself after being cornered by British and New Zealand warships in the South Atlantic in December. A boarding party from the Cossack found 299 British prisoners aboard the Altmark and forced their release, causing immense satisfaction and jubilation among the British public—and to hell with whatever international law had to say about it.

  The incident also provoked concern among the German high command, who were under no delusions about the pretext of Allied aid to Finland. If the British hadn't hesitated to violate Norwegian territorial waters for something as inconsequential as freeing a few prisoners, the Germans reasoned, surely they would be at least as likely to shrug off Norwegian neutrality for the far greater prize of denying Germany its ore supplies. Accordingly, the chief of the German Navy, Admiral Raeder, began pressing Hitler to move the date for the Norway invasion forward.

  Meanwhile in England, after three more weeks of wriggling and squeezing through Derbyshire caverns, rappelling down slippery ropes into flooded mines in Cornwall, and working blind in watery, slime-filled blackness, the Ampersand team was recalled to London for a further briefing session in the vaults below Admiralty House.

  * * *

  "Your Spanish visas have been fixed by nameless people at the U.S. State Department working through a CBS front," Winslade said as he handed two American passports across the desk for Ferracini and Cassidy to inspect. Winslade had acquired himself a permanent office at the Admiralty and was back in his British Navy uniform. "They'll get you from Paris to Madrid. From there, you fly to Rome as Joe Hennessey and Pat Brewster—a news reporter and sound engineer both with CBS, traveling together for a planned broadcast from the Vatican reviewing the first year of the new papacy. Italy is on good terms with the Franco regime after the aid that Mussolini sent in the Civil War, and travel on that route isn't too restricted."

  Cassidy studied his passport carefully. "And if anybody checks, the CBS office in Rome will confirm they're expecting these guys to show up?" he queried.

  "Of course."

  In a chair beside Cassidy, Ferracini examined the ID card, travel permit bearing official French and Spanish stamps, and other documents that Winslade had produced, all conjured up by a clandestine section of the MI6
department of British military intelligence. They were good; where appropriate, they had been given a worn and aged look. "It says here that we sail to France direct from New York this week," he remarked.

  Winslade opened a folder and began laying a series of items out on the desk. "Copy of a New York Herald Tribune from last Monday to put in your briefcase . . . two theater ticket stubs from Saturday—Broadway . . . dated receipt for shirts and pants from menswear store on Third Avenue . . . letter from wife to hotel address in Paris, postmarked Bensonhurst, Long Island, with snapshots of children—congratulations." Ferracini studied them briefly one at a time and nodded. It went without saying that all their clothes, shoes, pocket contents, and personal belongings would include nothing of British origin.

  Lindemann, sitting on a couch by the wall, was the only other person present this time. Each of the three pairs making up the Ampersand operation would be told only their own cover identities and route into Germany. Ferracini and Cassidy knew nothing of how, or under what guises, Warren, Payne, Lamson, and Ryan would be traveling. They didn't even know for sure who would be partnering whom, and therefore, if worse did come to worse, they would be unable even to describe the other pairs involved in the mission. Pairs whose descriptions were known were easier to spot than individuals.

  "In Rome, you change identities," Winslade went on. He handed across two files in red binders. "When you arrive, contact the American Consulate. Somebody there will give you instructions for exchanging your documents and belongings for two new sets. The details are given in these files. Memorize them. They're to be returned before you leave. Basically, you become Niels Jorgensen from Denmark, and Benito Cassalla, an Italian. One of you is a schoolteacher, the other an artist, and you share a common interest in classical archaeology. You've been spending the winter in Italy looking at Roman architecture and ruins—you'll be given plenty of sketches and photographs in Rome to substantiate that, and there'll be notes for you to copy in your own handwriting. You're returning to Denmark by train via Bologna, Verona, and Munich, with a change to make at Berlin for Hamburg and the Danish frontier."