The Proteus Operation

by James P. Hogan

  And on December 2, Winslade, Gordon Selby, and Kurt Scholder were among the group of scientists and officials watching tensely in a squash court at the University of Chicago as Fermi and his associates slowly withdrew the neutron-absorption rods from a pile containing 350 tons of graphite, 5 tons of uranium, and 36 tons of uranium oxide, built in the form of a flattened sphere measuring 26 feet across. Construction of the building that was supposed to house the project twenty miles west of Chicago in the Argonne Forest was behind schedule, so they had set it up instead beneath the grandstand at the Stagg Field stadium. Nobody had informed the university president or trustees.

  The counters recorded a neutron multiplication factor of 1.006: the worlds first nuclear reactor had gone critical. The rods were reinserted, and the multiplication dropped. The reaction was controllable.

  Dr. Compton placed a call to James B. Conant, the chairman of the NDRC at Harvard. "Jim, I think you'll be interested to know that the Italian navigator has landed in the new world. The natives are friendly."

  The scales of war were tipping rapidly.

  CHAPTER 53

  IN JANUARY 1943, THE Proteus team boarded a converted B-24 Liberator at Bolling Field, Washington, D.C., and were flown south to Brazil, across the Atlantic to Lagos, Nigeria, from there to Dakar on the tip of West Africa, arriving finally at Casablanca, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. There, just over two months after American forces under General Patton had landed to wrest the area from the Vichy French, Roosevelt and Churchill, accompanied by their Chiefs of Staff, were meeting to review the war effort and agree on future strategy.

  After resting the night at a hotel in the Anfa suburb of the city, the team was driven through sunny, palm-lined streets guarded by American troops to an outlying villa, where Churchill and Roosevelt held their private conferences away from the main staff sessions. Relatively few individuals had been admitted to the Proteus secret even now, and the only other persons present were George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, and Sir Alan Brooke, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff. The meeting took place in a large, airy room at the back of the villa. Orange and lemon trees surrounded a lawn and pool outside the open French windows, and armed sentries patrolled inconspicuously below a high wall at the rear.

  Churchill, cigar in hand and wearing a khaki bush shirt with baggy casual slacks, came around the map-covered table in the center of the room with a show of almost fatherly affection as the arrivals were shown in. He pumped their hands warmly and put his arm around Anna's shoulders to give her a hug. "It's a miracle!" he declared. "Impossible, I tell you, and yet here they are, back from the dead. We'd long given up any hope, you know."

  "Except Mortimer," Roosevelt said as he wheeled his chair across the room. "He was the one who talked us into keeping the machine running. I figured he should know you people better than we did."

  Marshall and Brooke were introduced. "I'm still not sure I believe it, you understand," Marshall said frankly. "I've read the report, and I can see you all standing here in this room, but I'm still not sure I believe it."

  Brooke could only shake his head. "I don't think it's possible to express anything adequately in words. I've been told about the way things were in the world you all came from, and I can see for myself the differences in this one of ours. . . . Really, what does one say?"

  "How about, 'Welcome back'?" Winslade suggested.

  Brooke smiled. "That's enough? Oh, very well, then, welcome back, all of you."

  "I wouldn't say that the changes were entirely our doing." Anna said. "You seem to have been busy, too."

  Roosevelt nodded. "Oh, sure, we haven't exactly been idle during your absence. I think we've managed things about as well as could reasonably be expected . . . a few regrets and miscalculations with hindsight, but I guess that's life."

  "Compared to the world we came from, it's astounding," Winslade said.

  "And your wounds, Ed—I've been worried about them," Churchill said. "Are they mending satisfactorily? And what about you, Paddy, and you, Harry? How are you feeling?"

  "Much better, thank you, sir," Payne replied. "Major Warren says I'll be back up to Special Operations standards in no time." Ryan and Ferracini said they felt fine.

  Churchill nodded happily. "Splendid, splendid.'' He smiled and rubbed his palms together for a moment. "And now, we have something to show you that you should find interesting. Brookie?"

  Brooke switched on a slide projector already positioned before a screen and inserted a frame, while Marshall closed a blind to darken the room. The picture was an aerial photograph, taken from a considerable height, of a tremendous plume of smoke rising over a landscape of low, rounded hills with open and forested patches. The smoke emanated from one end of a large industrial complex situated by a river. "Recognize it?" Churchill asked lightly. "It's from a set brought back by one of our Photo Recce flights a few days after you got back."

  "I guess we could have told you earlier, but it would have spoiled the surprise," Roosevelt said, grinning unashamedly.

  The Ampersand troops, who had memorized every detail of that layout, stared in astonishment and elation. Cassidy caught Ferracini's eyes, shook his head as if trying to clear his head of a dream, and they looked back at the screen. The picture was still there.

  Winslade was blinking behind his spectacles. "He did it!" he whispered. "He stood by what he said he was going to do. He did it!"

  "Yes," Anna mused distantly. "And I wonder what it cost him."

  Alan Brooke gave them a while to study the picture, then commented, "If this bomb is as powerful as people tell me, I'm surprised that the effects are so localized. The main plant there is hardly touched. All the smoke seems to be coming from that annex area at the top there, right on the edge."

  "Hammerhead was deep underground and heavily reinforced," Gordon Selby reminded him. "That would blanket most of the blast. Underground nuclear explosions usually vaporize a cavern and push up a surface blister, which gets sucked back down again to form a crater when the vapor condenses. To have punched through the surface at all, that must have been a fair-size bomb."

  In response to further questions, the Ampersand soldiers filled in details of the operation at Weissenberg, and Warren described briefly his return to England by submarine with the Knackes. Then an orderly brought in soft drinks and refreshments, and Marshall opened the blind again.

  "That was what Hitler was relying on, and now it's no more," Churchill said. "He's shot his bolt. This will prove to be the turning point of the war." He studied the food that had been brought in and selected a shrimp cocktail. "In fact, we've already begun planning the invasion back across the Channel into France. The code name we've given it is 'Overlord.' What do you think—appropriate, eh?"

  The others smiled. "So, Hammerhead is finally destroyed," Scholder said, picking up a thin-cut, salmon-and-cucumber sandwich. "Can we assume, then, that the threat of a Nazi atomic bomb has been eliminated completely?"

  "I wouldn't assume anything until this whole business is over," Marshall said.

  "How likely are they to develop a bomb, anyway, through their own efforts?" Anna asked. "Obviously, they know it's possible."

  "That's what I meant," Scholder said.

  Heads turned automatically toward Gordon Selby. "Their reliance on Overlord probably means that their own program has been allowed to lag," Selby said. "And from what I've gathered from the Europeans I worked with and our own intelligence sources, the German program seems to be focusing on an approach with heavy water as the moderator, rather than graphite, which Fermi is using. Heavy water isn't easy to come by."

  "In fact, the only installation under Nazi control that's capable of producing it in any quantity is a hydroelectric plant in southern Norway," Churchill said. "We sent an airborne commando unit to attack it in November, but the mission failed. However, we're sending in another group any day now—Norwegians this time. Let's hope they have better luck."

&nbs
p; "But the final insurance is our own program," Roosevelt said. "Now it's under the military, General Groves is moving the whole thing out to new laboratories at Los Alamos to be run by Oppenheimer. We're going flat out for it. We could be wrong about the German effort, and the only insurance is to make sure we get a bomb first."

  "Imagine what the world would come to if only Hitler had one," Churchill said.

  "I don't have to," Winslade replied. His face grew serious. "You know, you may find you need the bomb for more than just insurance before this is through."

  Churchill and Roosevelt glanced at each other uncertainly. "What do you mean, Claud?" Roosevelt asked.

  Winslade carried his drink slowly over to the French windows and stared out at the garden for a moment. Then he turned to face the room. "The generation that's growing up in Germany today has been systematically brutalized by the Nazi system," he said. "It's in their schools, their youth movement, their media, their political ideology—everywhere. It begins even in the nurseries. They're conditioned to the worship of violence and the military cult, to view power and strength as the only criteria for establishing right. Their teaching idealizes the right of the strong to subdue the weak and glorifies the triumph of brute force as the expression of natural law."

  Winslade shrugged and showed his palms briefly. "How do you get rid of a regime like this once it's taken root? You can't reason with it, because all you'll earn is contempt for what it sees as weakness. You can't bargain with it—a trading relationship implies equality, but all it understands is dominating or being dominated. You can't hope to coexist peaceably because your very existence represents either a threat or an opportunity—its obsession with might and mastery compels it to test its strength continually."

  "If the only thing that it respects is might, then perhaps the only way to earn its respect is to speak its own language and show it might, devastatingly, without half measures—to beat it squarely oh its own terms and outplay it by its own rules. In short, gentlemen, you knock the stuffing out of them. That might be the only way of getting this fixation out of their system."

  There was a heavy silence. Then Churchill said. "Yes, but at what price? Do we end up indistinguishable from the evil that we set out to destroy?"

  Winslade sighed. "Yes, I see the risk, he admitted. "But what's the alternative? The whole monstrosity doesn't belong in this world. It was never a part of it. It's an aberration that was imposed from the outside, like an infection. Sometimes it's impossible to get rid of an infection without damaging some healthy tissue. But if you succeed, the organism will recover."

  "Their cult of ingrained authoritarianism is what provides the breeding ground," Anna said, picking up the analogy. "Why else did Overlord choose the time and place that they did? It has to be eradicated, permanently. The West tried to be decent and civilized in 1918, and look what happened."

  Churchill looked at his three colleagues. "They're right, you know, Winston," Alan Brooke said quietly. "I wish there was another way, too."

  "I wish I could argue," Marshall said. He drew in a long breath. "But I can't."

  Roosevelt nodded.

  And so it came about that at Casablanca, the United States and Britain agreed on a major intensification of the strategic bomber offensive, and on giving top priority to the Manhattan Project, as the A-bomb program was now officially called. Their war aim, as was announced publicly at the end of the conference, would be nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers.

  The only major outstanding topic was the machine at Gatehouse. "My understanding is that even if the particular world that you've just returned from was to leave us alone, there still exists a chance that any of the others might, deliberately or otherwise, tune in to Gatehouse, or whatever the appropriate phrase is," Churchill said. "Is that not the case?"

  "Yes, that's it exactly." Scholder confirmed. "Crossed lines are possible. We've experienced a couple of instances already."

  "And from what I hear, no one really understands them," Roosevelt said. "Not even Einstein."

  "That's so, Scholder confirmed again. He'd spent most of his time since returning from Florida at Princeton.

  "Let's go through this again," Marshall said. "Now, this machine in Brooklyn is only the return connection, is that right? You people came here originally by means of a projector that could send you into this world without any machine needing to be here at all. The return-gate is only to connect you back again.

  "Correct," Scholder said.

  Marshall nodded. "Good. Then what I want to know is this. If we didn't have a return-gate, what would be the probability of a projector in one of these other universes just happening to project something here—without anything acting as some kind of 'beacon' to attract it?"

  "Oh." Scholder shrugged. "For one of them to just happen to hit this universe out of all the ones that exist in the branching system? Well, let's just say that accidentally finding a needle in a haystack would be a dead certainty by comparison." He shook his head. "The chances are next to nothing. That's why it doesn't happen every week."

  Churchill glanced at the other leaders and nodded decisively, as if that was what he had been waiting to hear. It was clear suddenly that they had discussed the subject thoroughly before hand. "Get rid of it," he said.

  The Proteus people looked at each other, but none of them could pretend to be surprised. They had been asking the same question, too. Nobody tried to argue. This was clearly one question that Churchill and Roosevelt had already made up their minds about.

  Accordingly, instructions were drawn up for the Gatehouse machine to be quietly and secretly dismantled, and for the pieces to be destroyed and dropped in the ocean; the design information and assembly drawings would be burned, and all references to the Proteus mission expunged from the official and private records of everyone who had been involved. Gatehouse would become once again just another warehouse on the waterfront in Brooklyn.

  For considering what had been inflicted on it, the world wasn't doing too bad a job at all of getting itself back into shape. Other universes had interfered enough.

  CHAPTER 54

  NOTHING SEEMED TO HAVE changed very much when Ferracini and Cassidy came in through the door and went downstairs to the corridor that led past Max's office. The double doors leading into the club had been revarnished; the glittery wallpaper on either side was the same, and should have been changed. There was a new hatcheck girl.

  "Say, what's a girl like you doing in a nice place like this?" Cassidy asked cheerfully as he handed his coat across the counter.

  The hatcheck girl began switching on an automatic bored look; then she stopped, puzzled, and frowned. "Did I hear that right?"

  "Who cares? Hi, I'm Cassidy. Who are you?"

  "Lisa. I—"

  "It isn't! a voice exclaimed from a short distance behind them. "It can't be. But, my God, it is—Cassidy!"

  "Hey, Max, you old rascal!" Cassidy roared. Max came out of the office, beaming beneath his high, tanned forehead and crinkly hair, and they shook hands. "So, how've you been, Max? I just said to Harry here a second ago that . . . say, that's strange. Where the hell did he go?"

  But Ferracini had heard the voice singing inside the club.

  He stood watching her in the spotlight for a long time from just inside the door. She was wearing her hair tied up and high rather than the loose and wavy way he preferred it, but it looked good for her job; the button chin, high cheeks, and turned-up nose were just the way he remembered. She was wearing a sequined gold and tangerine dress.

  George had gone. There was a different piano player now, an older man with a benign-looking face and a ragged white mustache. He reminded Ferracini of Einstein in a vague kind of way. The place was busy, but most of the faces were strange. It was full of uniforms now. Lou, looking as inscrutable as ever, was still tending the bar in a black vest and white shirt with the cuffs turned back. Pearl was on a stool at one end, and Sid sat with some people at one of t
he tables.

  "How the hell are you ever gonna enjoy life, Harry, if you keep falling in love all the time?" Cassidy said, joining him.

  Ferracini grinned. "Worth coming home to though, huh, Cass?" He saw that Max was there, too. "Hey, Max! How are things? Say, you're looking just great!"

  "You, too, Harry. Things? Oh . . ." Max waved a hand. "The war may be bad for some, but it's not so bad for business. It's good to have you two back. What about the others, Floyd and the rest? Do you still see them?"

  "It's good to be back. Sure, they'll be along later." Ferracini hesitated. "Is Janet, ah, is she still—"

  Max tilted a hand from side to side in front of his face. "Oh, never anything serious. You know these women, Harry— they have an intuition. She knew you were coming back. So, anyway, where in the hell have you guys been?"

  "Top-secret presidential assignment." Cassidy told him.

  "Oh, yeah—for three years? Still the same old Cassidy, eh?"

  "Seriously." Cassidy said.

  "Wanna know something?" Max nudged him with an elbow and winked. "I got the exclusive agency rights on the Brooklyn Bridge. Go ahead, make me an offer."

  "Come on, Cass, let's get a drink." Ferracini said.

  Max walked them over to the bar. "Look who's back," he announced to the company.

  Pearl looked around from her stool at the end. "Jesus, I don't believe it!" A couple of the others there were old-timers and pleased to see them back. Sid excused himself from the people at the table and came over.

  "Say, what's this?" Cassidy lifted Pearl's hand and admired the ring she was wearing. "You? Now, I don't believe that!"

  "Well, life's full of these little surprises." Pearl said in her husky voice.

  "Anyone we know?" Cassidy asked.

  "You remember Johnny Six Jays?" Max said.

  "You're kidding!"