The Proteus Operation

by James P. Hogan

  The bottom level of Hammerhead contained mainly power-generating machinery, ventilating equipment, and stores; the few people there had been incapacitated by the gas and fumes. There was no likelihood of their recovering sufficiently to attempt any heroics from behind in the next few minutes, and Ferracini and Cassidy moved fast, leapfrogging to cover each other, heading for the steel stairs that gave the only access to the higher levels.

  A guard in SS uniform and a man in a white coat were starting to push the heavy door at the top shut when Ferracini came up the steps. He fired from behind a motor housing, and the guard reeled back; the other man crumpled in a heap in the doorway. More were trying to push the door from behind, but the body was blocking it. Someone leaned around to pull the body away, but went down on top of it as Ferracini fired again. Cassidy ran forward under cover of the burst to hurl two grenades through the doorway, following them with a burst of fire from a different angle. Then Ferracini moved up and cleared aside the two men he had shot.

  He was looking into the chamber that housed the return-gate itself—similar in form to the machine in Brooklyn, which had been modeled on the same design. The main cylinder was above and ahead of him, with a railed platform running around it at half-height. The sides of the chamber were lined with instrumentation and equipment bays, ladders, and raised catwalks. Figures were shouting and running everywhere, with the greatest confusion in the area immediately behind the doorway, where the grenades had exploded among the people who had managed to get out from the lower level just as they ran into others coming the other way to investigate the commotion. More were starting to cough and choke as the gas from below began pouring through, and the confusion became a panic.

  It wasn't a time for niceties. Ferracini raked the mass of colliding, convulsing figures with a long burst of continuous fire from the doorway, and Cassidy leaped on through, firing at the galleries above and shooting out the lights in the vicinity.

  Ferracini slapped in another magazine and followed moments later.

  Once through the doorway, they spread out to gain a wider field of fire for mutual support, all the time working closer to the machine and moving into positions covering from different angles the entrance into the machine chamber. A figure staggered into view on one of the walkways and aimed a handgun at Cassidy. Ferracini sent bullets spattering off the surrounding girders before he could fire, and the figure retreated out of sight.

  The scene was beginning to resemble a Brueghelian depiction of Hades, with the near end of the chamber darkened, smoke thickening and swirling around the looming bulk of the machine, and terrified figures retreating across a bloodstained floor littered with writhing bodies. The suddenness and violence of the assault had caught the SS guards present in the machine chamber completely unprepared, and the gas had impeded any organized resistance. Cassidy reloaded behind an equipment cubicle, and Ferracini concentrated on the stairs and platform above to clear a way to the machine.

  Then the first squad of SS reinforcements from the upper levels came in through the entrance at the end of the chamber. But too fast, too reckless: They came straight out into bright lights and a crossfire directed from shadows. And they hadn't been prepared for the gas. They fell back in disarray, leaving several of their number behind. A voice outside the entrance shouted orders. More guards rushed in, but ran into the people who were trying to get out, and a confused melee ensued. Cassidy threw a grenade into the middle of it. In the resulting chaos, Ferracini reached one of the flights of steps around the machine and got up onto the platform fronting the transfer chamber.

  The platform looked down over the area inside the entranceway, where SS guards were fanning out among the machinery and equipment consoles. Bullets rattled off the steel framework around Ferracini, and he could hear Cassidy firing below. He aimed a couple of quick bursts down through the rails where some of the guards were sheltering, then ducked back behind the edge of the platform to begin frantically unpacking the explosives he was carrying.

  Then he realized that his lungs were heaving. His oxygen was exhausted. He had no choice. He loosened the straps at the back of his head and pulled the facepiece of his rebreather unit to one side. Involuntarily his lungs gasped for air, and in seconds he was doubled over on his knees, coughing and retching. He was unaware of the light that appeared suddenly at the darkened end of chamber as a second door opened to admit more SS from the emergency shaft at the rear.

  Below, a group of SS had managed to work around between Cassidy and the door where he and Ferracini had entered, and they had pinned Cassidy down between one of the supporting columns and an electrical cubicle. Cassidy was changing position and firing desperately to defend himself from three directions, but he was cornered. He threw his last grenade; his gun ran out of ammunition. . . . And then Lamson and Payne appeared in the doorway from the lower level and mowed his attackers down from behind.

  Leaving Kurt Scholder with Pfanzer and a couple of others to watch the dumbfounded duty crew in the control room, Winslade hurried downstairs to rejoin the people waiting outside the lock doors. Young Scholder handed him a bundle of cylindrical objects, each with a plastic pencil protruding from one end, similar to the ones that Anna and Keith Adamson were holding. Adamson had insisted on coming, too, and some of the Pipe Organ people had taken over the job of guarding Kahleb and company.

  "They're all preset for thirty seconds," young Scholder said. "Just snap the pencils and get out. Winslade slung his automatic cannon across his back and looked at Anna. "All set?" She nodded.

  Somebody came out of the control room and called down from the gallery, "The beam's locking now." At the same moment the double doors leading into the transfer lock began sliding apart. Inside, the chamber had begun to glow red.

  "Stop that!" a voice shouted. Two figures in the golden, loose-fitting tunics of the Senior Directorate were striding out of one of the side doors, followed by Kahleb and others from his group. Gray-uniformed security guards appeared on the gallery above, running toward the control-room door. Somebody inside slammed it shut, and through the window they could see Scholder brandishing his gun. Pfanzer was waving frantically down and pointing at the transfer lock, while outside on the gallery, the guards began breaking the door down.

  The doors opposite the transfer lock were open, and more guards were coming across the floor of the Dispatch Preparation Area beyond. "Go!" young Scholder shouted, and closed ranks with Eddie, T'ung-Sen, and the others while Winslade, Anna, and Adamson sprinted into the lock. The guards plowed into the wall of people, pulling them aside, but they were too late. The doors of the transfer lock were already closing.

  Ferracini's face was pressed against the steel mesh of the platform flooring, but he was breathing again. Powerful fans in the ceiling ducts overhead were drawing up the clean air being injected into the level below. A foot landed near his head. Ferracini rolled away instinctively and found himself looking up at a hooded, black-clad form with window-covered eyes and face hidden by a mask with a ribbed tube leading out. He thought it was Ryan, but couldn't be sure. Across the platform, another of the team was running fuse cord between charges placed along the outside of the machine and connecting it to another cord leading up from below, while two more were firing down at the floor and up at the galleries. One was Cassidy; the other, who looked like Payne, was covered in blood and had one arm hanging uselessly.

  A hand lifted at his body harness, and he kneeled groggily. The figure over him was Ryan. Ryan fired at something below, then picked up the charges that Ferracini had begun to unwrap and moved across the platform to add them to the ones that Lamson was placing. Ferracini looked along the machine wall and saw SS uniforms already up on the walkway, working their way along toward the platform. He reached for the submachine gun still lying beside him, aimed, and squeezed the trigger as they came out to make a rush for the platform.

  Nothing! Empty!

  Ferracini started to get up as bullets flew around him. Something seared
the side of his chest and upper arm, and an impact on his shoulder sent him spinning around and sprawling across the floor again, in front of the access port into the machine. A grenade landed on the flooring just feet away from his face. He stared at it numbly, unable to react. Then Cassidy materialized, firing from the hip over Ferracini's head, and kicked the grenade away into space. Ryan was behind Cassidy, firing along the walkway on the other side of the machine. SS were coming along both sides of the cylinder now; more were coming up from below, climbing over the rail at the end of the platform. They had to hold them off until the charges blew— that was all that mattered now.

  Payne went down, hit again. Then Ryan staggered and fell back against the side of the port entrance. Only Cassidy and Lamson were left fighting. Ferracini strained to pull another magazine from his ammunition pouch, but he couldn't make his arm move. He looked up and saw SS coming toward him across the platform, a blond, blue-eyed giant in the lead. For a second the giant looked down triumphantly, his lips curled back in a contemptuous sneer, made grotesque by a strange light that had begun glowing from somewhere behind Ferracini. Ferracini groped with his good arm for the automatic at his hip, but the giant was already aiming. . . . And then his head exploded like an overripe peach hit with a hammer.

  The black-uniformed figures that had been moving up behind him disintegrated into pieces of bodies coming apart as they were hurled back against the rail at the end of the platform. Ferracini turned his head dazedly and looked up. That was when he knew he'd been hit worse than he thought. Because that was when he realized he was dead.

  It wasn't the way he had imagined it—not that he'd spent a great deal of time brooding over such things. But he'd expected all kinds of mystical, multicolored visions and exhilarating sensations, strange music, maybe, like the things the drug freaks talked about. . . . He'd never had any curiosity about drugs. The last thing a Special Operations trooper needed was scrambled brains. But the actuality was really quite . . . ordinary. Disappointing, somehow. It was ordinary, but in a distant, unreal kind of way. . . .

  He saw an apparition of Claud standing over him, blasting away hoards of SS with some kind of an elaborate hand-held machine gun that fired miniature bombs and sounded like a train. Probably a hallucination expressing a subconscious wish, Ferracini thought with detachment. Anna Kharkiovitch was in it, too, firing another one. And even Keith Adamson—how had he gotten into this?—was there, running out of the machine, stooping, and dragging Payne back inside. Cassidy was slipping one of Ryan's arms around his shoulder, and Lamson was pulling a knife out of a limp SS body as it crumpled to the floor.

  Then Claud was looking down and smiling in the way that only Claud could. "Come on, Harry, get up," the phantasm said to Ferracini's ghost. "We haven't got all day. I rather suspect that you've overstayed your welcome."

  Anna Kharkiovitch leaned down and helped Claud heave him to his feet. It wasn't respectful. He was dead. Why couldn't they leave him alone? Then she was pushing him into the red light of the gate, with Cassidy helping Ryan just ahead of them and the sound of Claud still firing coming from behind. "No, wrong way, Ferracini heard himself mumbling stupidly. "We have to go the other way. Harvey's waiting for us up top."

  And then he blacked out.

  CHAPTER 46

  GASPS SOUNDED AMONG THE people in the antechamber as the transfer lock doors slid open again. Winslade and the other two who had vanished only moments before were back, but now there were five more figures with them. They were clad in black, greasy suits with hoods, and masks covered their faces. Three were injured and being helped, two apparently unconscious. Ignoring the guards who were trying to herd them back against the wall, some of the scientists rushed forward to assist as the group began moving toward the doors. Winslade had an ugly gash where a bullet had scared his cheek, and blood was running down over his shirtfront and jacket.

  The commander of the security force, Major Felipe Juanseres, who had arrived with Jorgassen behind the two gold-clad directors, stared grimly when he saw the limp, bloodstained figures being passed out of the lock, and the condition of the others. A wisp of stinging vapor from inside touched his nostrils. "Those are the ones," Kahleb said, moving to the front and pointing. "Those two, and the woman. He's the one who attacked the guard."

  "Arrest them!" one of the directors ordered. The guards closed in around the lock entrance.

  "Look at them!" Jorgassen protested at Juanseres. "Now tell me it's only a scientific project at the other end. Those men have come straight out of a battle."

  "Arrest them, I said," the director ordered again. "We are in charge of this establishment. You report to us."

  On the gallery above, guards were hustling Scholder and Pfanzer out of the control room. Another man came out behind them. "The link's disconnected," he called down. "All the coupling functions have zeroed."

  "You owe no loyalty to criminals," T'ung-Sen told the guards who were holding him and his group against the wall at gunpoint. "They're mixed up in murder, all of them."

  "Mass murder," Eddie said beside him. The guards looked questioningly toward Juanseres for instructions. "I gave an order," the director snapped. "Your job is security, T'ung-Sen said to Juanseres. "There have been gross irregularities here."

  "They have no authority here!" Kahleb insisted. Juanseres looked from one group to the other. "That's enough," he declared. Then, to the guards, "Lock all of them up. That lot, those, all of them. They can all cool off until the matter's out of our hands. I'm calling in CIAF."

  "You can't—" one of the directors began, but one of the guards jabbed him in the ribs.

  "I said that's enough," Juanseres repeated. "I'm assuming full responsibility. My first duty is to maintain order here. He turned to the guards again. "Take them away. Detain those people in the conference room on R7, those in the executive lounge, and that group in the reception area. Get a medical team here immediately for these injured men and have the emergency room standing by. Take the people who are with them over there, too, to be cleaned up and checked over. After that, put them under guard in the staff canteen at the back. They can wait there."

  CHAPTER 47

  IT WAS DUSK, ANNA Kharkiovitch was sitting with Adamson at one of several tables in an airy room with white and orange walls. Some dishes of beef in a spiced sauce with vegetables and fruit had been brought in, but with the strain of waiting no one had eaten much. Scholder was pacing restlessly by the long window on one side. In the floodlit compound below, the first wave of CIAF aircraft had landed, and efficient-looking military formations in sky-blue uniforms were deploying quickly toward the gates and among the surface buildings of the Pipe Organ installation.

  "Back home, it ought to be about the eleventh of April by my reckoning," Scholder said. "That means we've been gone six weeks."

  "Just over five hours here," Adamson murmured.

  Anna looked up. "So they would have taken how long? About a month to reach the objective in Germany?"

  "Evidently." Scholder nodded. "A little longer than planned, but all the more fortunately so, it seems."

  "Except for Major Warren," Anna said. "I wonder what happened to him."

  "Well, I suppose we'll find out eventually," Scholder said. "My guess is that it might be a while before any of us goes home."

  "They can get us back then?" Anna said.

  Scholder nodded. "I think so. But how much time might have gone by there when they get around to it is anyone's guess."

  From what he had been able to gather in the short time he'd had to talk about the subject, the "interference" from the Gatehouse machine had been carried on a hyper-dimensional wave function resonating at frequencies that were slightly offset from the spectral group of the Nazi return-gate that Pipe Organ normally connected to. Out of curiosity, one of the shift managers in the control room had ordered the beam parameters to be set to the offset values, and the connection to Gatehouse had been the result. Duplicating the settings should reestablish the
connection, provided, of course, that the people at Gatehouse didn't give up hope and abandon the machine in the meantime.

  "I'm still not sure I understand this time business," Adamson said. "Why does any time have to have gone by in our world at all? If the machine here has got a knob you twiddle to select the date you want to connect to, or whatever does the same job, why can't you simply set it to the date that we left on, no matter how much time goes by here? That way, my wife wouldn't even have to know there'd been anything unusual about the day at all." His face knotted into a mystified frown as he followed the thought through to its unavoidable conclusion. "But come to that, why couldn't you set it to an even earlier date? No, that wouldn't make sense, would it? Maybe I'd decide not to come here at all. But I am here. . . . And then there'd be two of me back there, like you here, Kurt. But there weren't. Oh, hell . . ."

  "You see, it gets complicated," Scholder said, nodding. "To rejoin the universe you left, you have to preserve the synchronization relationship. Otherwise—if you tried entering its past, for example, which implies being able to alter it—you'd simply enter a new branch instead, as we did when we came back from '75. You could do that if you want, Keith, but you wouldn't be back in the world that you left."

  Adamson thought about it, sighed, and finally shook his head. "It's bad enough already. I'll wait it out," he agreed.

  More CIAF aircraft descended vertically outside. Then one of the security guards outside opened the door at the far end of the room, and Winslade came in with Jorgassen and a man wearing a doctor's smock. Scholder turned, and Adamson half rose from his chair. "How are they?" Anna asked tensely.