Along with, inevitably, new sets of papers, Mueller provided some clothes appropriate to their new roles—a crumpled suit with vest, necktie, felt hat, and overcoat for Ferracini, and for Cassidy a workman's leather jacket, shirt, sweater, and corduroy pants. Together they ate a funereal supper of black bread, sauerkraut, and a morsel of sausage and dry cheese apiece. Then, tired from their journey, Ferracini and Cassidy retired to spend the night sharing a straw mattress on the floor in a damp and drafty upstairs room. The place was clearly a "human drop-box," a transitory link in the chain. "Mueller would evaporate as soon as they had left, and whatever attempts might be made to trace them to their origins, the trail would end right there.
The next day had dragged through to lunchtime before a man in a belted raincoat at last appeared at the front door to collect them, introducing himself as Gustav Knacke. He was short and stocky, with a brisk, chirpy attitude that inspired confidence; he had black curly hair, a tight mouth upturned at the corners, and dark eyes that seemed to be darting constantly everywhere and missing nothing. His breezy, uninhibited chattiness came as a welcome relief after the austere, silent presence of Dr. Mueller.
Knacke worked at the Weissenberg plant, he told them as they drove out of Leipzig in a noisy, smoky Fiat that had seen better days. He was a chemist involved in the development of firefighting and safety equipment. His wife worked as a clerk at the same plant. They would be putting up "Ferdinand" and "Juggler"—Knacke knew Ferracini and Cassidy only by their Ampersand code-names—until the time was ready. There would be more clothes at the house to replace the things they had left in their bags.
"Gasoline is practically impossible to obtain as a private citizen, but I use the car on company business," he told them as he drove. "Take these in case we're stopped. They're worker's passes for Weissenberg. You're a plant maintenance supervisor and an electrician. If anyone asks, we've been to Leipzig this morning to get parts for a critical repair job. Yes, the parts are in the trunk. Here are the receipts. Read them so you'll know what we've bought."
"Is that how you're planning to get us into the plant later?" Ferracini asked.
"Yes."
"So you must be where the six of us come together," Cassidy said.
"That's right."
Each of the pairs coming into Germany would have its own contact like the shoemender, who would know nothing of where they were bound. Also, no doubt, Knacke didn't know where the bodies that he retrieved from the "drop boxes" had come from.
"How about the others?" Cassidy asked. "Have any of them shown up yet?"
Knacke shook his head. "Not yet. It's still early, though. But we shouldn't be talking about that until . . . oh-oh."
Two armed policemen were standing in the road ahead, and another was walking forward with one hand raised and the other pointing straight at them. Knacke stopped the car a few feet away and his two passengers tensed, but the policeman turned away and walked back to rejoin the others. Then they saw they were at a railroad crossing, and vehicles from the other direction had been stopped, too. A minute later, two locomotives in tandem rumbled through, pulling a train of freight cars, followed by flatcars loaded with shrouded field guns and gray-painted tanks emblazoned with the black cross of the Wehrmacht.
"You see, that's what we get," Knacke exclaimed, tossing up his hands. "Swindles, always swindles. Our illustrious Dr. Ley will produce a 'People's Car' for under a thousand marks that everyone can afford, the Führer promised. And so they invented a pay-before-you-get-it plan—neat, eh?—in which every worker pays five marks a week, or more if they can squeeze it out of you. When you have paid seven hundred fifty marks, then you get your order number that entitles you to a car as soon as they start coming off the line. But the number is all you get. Nobody has seen a car yet. And the factory that they built with our money at Fallersleben—more cars per year than Ford turns out in America, they said—is making tanks." He threw up his hands again. "What good is that to me? Am I supposed to take my wife shopping in a tank?"
Ferracini and Cassidy grinned at each other as the car began moving again. Ferracini settled back in the front seat to see where they were. Yes, he knew this area. Some things were as he remembered; others had changed. Or rather, they hadn't changed yet. It was a strange kind of reverse déjà vu.
Director Kahleb frowned. He was seated at one end of the table in the room upstairs from the reception area, where Winslade and Anna had been taken after Scholder and Adamson's disappearance a half-hour previously. Nothing was making sense. "If your intentions are as innocent as you make out, why did your two companions run away like that?" he asked. "I still haven't heard a good answer."
"How should I know without asking them?" Winslade retorted. "Perhaps they think everyone is insane here. I can see why they might."
The silver-haired man whom Kahleb had summoned held up a hand. "We can go into that when Shelmer arrives," he said. He looked at Winslade. "Now, getting back to the subject, you say you've never heard of the Nazis. You're not with Hitler at all?"
"Hitler?" Winslade blinked at him with a mystified expression. "You mean Adolf Hitler?"
"Well, of course. Who else?"
"The madman? But he was assassinated, oh . . . I don't know how many years ago. What does he have to do with anything?"
"How could we be connected with him?" Anna Kharkiovitch chipped in.
"You are from 1940," Kahleb said, just to be doubly sure.
"Yes."
'And there wasn't a Reich Führer back there, where you came from?"
"Führer?" Winslade looked blankly at Anna.
"They must mean the Central European Commissar," she said, doing a good job of sounding as if she were trying to be helpful.
"Oh, yes, of course." Winslade looked back. "That would be Comrade Georgi Yussenklovov."
"So you're with him, then," the silver-haired man concluded, nodding in a way that said at least they had gotten somewhere at last.
"No," Winslade said.
There were groans followed by a baffled pause. "Look," Kahleb said wearily, "let's start all over again. . . ."
One of the scientists listening from the side of the room turned his head and leaned toward another standing next to him. "This is completely unprecedented," he whispered. "It shouldn't have been possible, but it sounds as if we cross-hooked into a wrong universe entirely. It must have something to do with that interference we've been getting."
The Knackes' home was a solid, respectable, brick house with a tiled roof and walls covered with ivy, comfortably secluded behind hedges and shrubbery in a quiet area of woods and houses about five miles from Weissenberg. Gustav Knacke said that it had been built by his father, who had been a teacher of theology and philosophy at the University of Leipzig. It seemed the family had a long history in the area.
Knacke took them in the back door of the house and started a fire in the living room. They would have to make themselves at home for the rest of the afternoon, he said, since he was expected at the plant. He would be back later in the evening with Marga, his wife. He cautioned them to stay inside the house, to keep the fire low to avoid advertising that the house wasn't empty, and not to answer the door or the telephone.
"Neighbors!" he exclaimed despairingly as he left. "Because their own tiny-minded lives are so dull, they poke their noses into other people's. Fortunately, the houses are far apart around here, and we have lots of trees. But it's better to be safe." He shook his head. "They send you cards at Christmas and wish you good morning with a smile on their way home from church, but give them half a chance and they're rushing to get themselves in the good books down at the police station. They bully their servants and grovel to their bosses. I fear it's part of the mentality of too many Germans."
Cassidy found a spare blanket in one of the closets, and after taking off his boots, stretched out on the couch in front of the fire and went to sleep. Ferracini had never known anybody with the stamina to go for such lengths of time without rest w
hen the situation demanded, or the capacity for so much sleep when it didn't. He himself felt moody and restless.
He prowled about the house, getting his bearings. It was a sober, but at the same time tastefully decorated and dignified place, with paneled entrance hall and stairs, solid furnishings of walnut and oak, and china and glassware in cabinets in the dining room. The library had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a grand piano. There was a music stand near the piano with the score of a Mozart sonata lying open on top, and a violin case was propped against a nearby chair.
Ferracini took down some of the books at random and turned idly the pages. Plays and poems—Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare . . . Lives of the Great Composers . . . art, history, and gardening. . . . He moved along to another section. Analytic Functions of the Complex Variable; An Introduction to Differential Geometry and the Theory of Curvature; Physics since 1900. . . . And farther on, Eastern Mythology; A History of Thought.
He found himself growing depressed. So much had been created; so much had been discovered; but apart from what he'd learned at school, he had been taught only how to kill and destroy. A craftsman might work for months, applying the knowledge gained in a lifetime in order to create something that any fool with a hammer could smash in a second. On the face of it, nothing worthwhile should have lasted. Yet the strange thing was that over the ages cities and nations had grown; works of art and science had accumulated; civilization had spread. Didn't that say that mankind's creative and constructive instincts far outweighed its destructive element? Man's overriding compulsion was to build and preserve. The interludes of destructiveness constituted the aberrations.
If that was so, then the whole world that Ferracini was from represented the supreme aberration, and he himself was just as much an aberration along with it. The resentment that had never been far below the surface welled up anew as the realization came home to him of just how much he had forfeited to that world and those responsible for shaping it. Now, finding himself face to face with a remnant of the world that had died, the full comprehension at last dawned on him of the true nature of the hideous force that he had been fighting all through his professional life.
His sense of purpose became suddenly clearer than it had ever been. It was as if his life until now had been a preparation for this moment. He found a grimly satisfying irony in the thought that all the knowledge and skill he commanded in the arts of destruction would now be concentrated on the task of destroying, in a sense, the world that had made him a destroyer. And he knew that if he succeeded, he would remain a part of the new world that would come into being, to share whatever new future lay ahead. He would have earned his place in it.
Frau Knacke was a proud and handsome woman, the kind whose looks sharpen and take on character with years, rather than fade. She had a full figure, which she carried well, raven black hair just starting to show gray streaks, a firm mouth, and deep, intelligent eyes. "You can stay here for as long as you need to," she told Ferracini and Cassidy as she showed them into one of the bedrooms upstairs. "The beds have been aired, and you will find more clothes, shaving gear, and so on in that closet."
The room was furnished with two beds, a long couch in a bay window, two small armchairs facing a low table, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers. Sporting trophies stood on a shelf with some books and some models of Great War biplanes. A picture on the wall showed several rows of laughing youths wearing short pants, ties, and school blazers.
"We have two sons," Frau Knacke explained. "Wolfgang is in Berlin, studying to be a chemist like Gustav." She smiled sadly and shook her head at the insanity of it all. "The other one, Ulrich, was conscripted and is now with an artillery battery somewhere."
"He's supposed to be in Poland," Gustav said, sucking an empty pipe in the doorway. "But we know he isn't." He gave a sly wink. "We got a letter from him last week. He said he would send Marga some shoes like Aunt Hilda's. But our Aunt Hilda, you see, brought back a souvenir pair of wooden clogs from her honeymoon in Holland. So we deduce that Ulrich's unit has been secretly transferred to the West. There'll be something big happening in that direction before very much longer, you mark my word."
How had it happened that these people were providing hospitality to two men who were enemies of the very regime that their son had been called away to risk his life defending? Cassidy brought the subject up later when they were having dinner. "Why are you doing it?" he asked. "I mean, we're in a strange situation here. We can't help being curious."
Gustav mopped up the last drops of his soup with a piece of bread. "I suppose you could say we both believe that certain things in the world run deeper than the colors printed on maps and count for more than flags and anthems, or fanatical ideologies. Those are transient, trivial things, things invented by men, which relate only to the petty day-to-day affairs of men. They pass and are forgotten. The universe won't remember or care."
He glanced at Marga. She smiled faintly and gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. Gustav looked at his guests. "But there are other, more permanent things—things that don't change with a whim."
"How do you mean?" Ferracini asked.
"We are both scientists, you see," Gustav said. "I'm a chemist. Marga used to teach anthropology at Leipzig."
"I resigned because of the lunatic racial doctrines we were expected to teach because they suited current political needs," she said. "'Nazi Science ! It's the poison they are pouring into the minds of young people that we are prepared to fight against."
"Truth, of course, pays no attention to political needs," Gustav went on, "or to the needs of any other kind of ideology for that matter. What is true will remain true regardless of all the wishful thinking in the world that would have it otherwise. And the purpose of science is to discover what is absolute and unchangeable, inherent in the fabric of the universe and completely uninfluenced by man's passions or by whether or not we even exist at all."
"You make it sound almost like a religion," Cassidy commented.
Gustav nodded. "Albert Einstein—you've heard of him, no doubt. I saw him once from a distance, you know. Einstein said that scientific research is the only thing that qualifies as a religion. If religion claims to deal with the absolute and the universal, then what could be more absolute and universal than the things revealed through mathematics and physics? But the systems that are called religions, what do they concern themselves with? Words that a person utters—which god he thinks he talks to. Whom somebody might choose to make love with. What books he reads. Trivial things, things that concern the behavior of people. There's nothing absolute or universal about that! Who do people think they are to imagine that the universe cares about their antics on this little speck of mud? Only people care about such things. But they persuade themselves that their little problems have cosmic importance." Gustav threw up his hands in a gesture of exasperation. "And these are the people who in the same breath accuse scientists of being arrogant! I ask you! Did you ever hear such an absurdity?"
"There are concepts of human progress and the advancement of freedom that we value above politics or national loyalty," Marga said. "Few people realize where this monstrous regime of Hitler's is leading. Have you any idea of the kind of world that would result if it isn't stopped?" Ferracini and Cassidy carried on eating and said nothing.
"It has to be stopped," Gustav said. "And we will help stop it in any way that is within our power. All other considerations must take second place. Your purpose in coming here is to hasten that result. That puts us on the same side in the only respect that matters."
Ferracini asked, "Out of curiosity, how much have you been told about our purpose? What do you know about why we're here?"
"Not very much," Gustav said. "Our place is simply to get the six of you into the plant."
"Our?" Cassidy queried. "You mean you and Marga?"
"There is another also, called Erich," Gustav said. "He is reliable. But anyway . . . after that? Well, since I have received no further instructions, I as
sume that you know what your mission is once you're inside. If you need further help, then presumably you'll ask for it."
Ferracini nodded. "That sounds good. Let's leave it like that for now."
Gustav's eyes twinkled, and he toyed with his fork for a moment. "But since an old friend of mine, Professor Lindemann, is involved, I suppose it would be no great feat of deduction to presume that you have come from England. But I wouldn't place your accents as English—more American if anything, I'd guess." He held up a hand hastily before either of them could reply. "No, please, don't say anything. It's better if I don't know. None of us can resist the temptation to let people know when we think we've been a little clever, eh?"
He folded his napkin and placed it on the table, then glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. "Nearly time for the BBC news broadcast from London," he said. "Highly illegal, naturally, but by averaging out their propaganda and our propaganda, we generally manage to get a fair idea of what's going on . . . we think. It seems that there will be an armistice between the Finns and the Russians any day now. The Finns put up a good light; but with the discrepancy in numbers there was never really any doubt of the outcome."
He got up from the table. "And after that, well, we don't have any jazz or swing, I'm afraid, but there is a collection of classical records in the library. Or perhaps you might like to listen to something live? Marga and I play quite a good piano-violin duet, you know, even if I do say so myself. Did you know that Reinhard Heydrich is supposed to be an expert violinist? He's very popular among the wives of the Nazi leaders because he can entertain at their dinner parties. I've heard he's been known to weep with emotion at the beauty of the music. Would you believe that—a man like him? What a curious mixture of baffling personalities this whole phenomenon has brought together."
The Proteus Operation Page 34
