"Sense of public duty," Pearl said. "Someone had to try and straighten him out. The only trouble is, I'm getting crooked." She sighed. "Most brides get a veil. I get a hood. It's the story of my life."
Lou set down the drinks. "On the house." Then a flicker of uncertainty crossed his face as he stood looking at Ferracini. "Did I tell you there was a guy in here asking for you and Cass, Harry?"
Ferracini blinked at him. "It's been three years, Lou. You sure you're talking to the right person?"
"Oh, sure. Lemme see now . . . on the short side, about that high. Pale face, mustache, wearing a hat . . . had dark glasses and kept em on inside. Acted strange all the time— kinda furtive."
Ferracini thought back. "Yes, I remember that now . . . the guy who was talking to George, right?" He shook his head disbelievingly. "Yes, you did tell me, Lou. We never found out who he was."
Lou turned away and pulled an old cardboard shoe box from a ledge at the back of the bar, crammed with dog-eared scribblings and slips of paper. He rummaged through the collection for a few seconds, then pulled out one of the slips, crumpled it up, and tossed it into a trash bin. Ferracini shook his head and looked away.
Out in the center of the dance floor, Janet had just begun her final number, when her eyes strayed over in the direction of the bar and she noticed something familiar about the tall, yellow-haired figure with a mustache, talking to Pearl, Max, and a couple of the others. For just a fraction of a second, she couldn't place the face. Then she saw who was with him, and her voice faltered involuntarily. The piano continued for a bar longer and then stopped. Some of the people listening at the front tables looked at each other with puzzled expressions. Janet recovered herself quickly and smiled. "Oh, dear, I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen—I must have kicked out of gear for a moment. Can we start that one again, Oscar?" From the bar, the figure with dark wavy hair raised his glass toward her and grinned. The piano played again, and she sang.
Ferracini eased himself onto one of the stools and leaned back to rest an elbow on the bar. Probably for the first time ever, he was at ease in himself and content with the world. He tuned out what Cassidy was saying to the others behind, and let his mind drift back over the things that had happened to him since the return from that mission in 1975: getting mixed up in the strange project at Tularosa that had sent him into another world; setting up the machine at Gatehouse, then moving over to England, and crossing Europe for the operation at Weissenberg, only to be snatched into a completely different world again, this time in the future. And finally, coming back again. He hoped life wouldn't seem too tame now after it all.
And the people: the team he had worked with and been part of; the scientists—Einstein, Szilard, Fermi, Teller, Wigner. The statesmen and their aides and service chiefs— Roosevelt and Churchill; Eden, Duff Cooper, Lindemann; Hopkins, Ickes, Hull; Brooke, Marshall. . . .
And, of course, Claud. That was the only sad part about it: He would miss Claud.
Ferracini had seen the look on Claud's face when they were shown the reconnaissance photograph at Casablanca, and he suspected that Claud had made his mind up right there and then. Claud had returned to the twenty-first century to be the star witness in his younger self's defense. He had gone to repay the debt that he felt he owed for what his younger self had done for him.
In fact, young Winslade's defense would have two star witnesses—Anna Kharkiovitch had gone, too. "It was something that started a while ago, Kurt Scholder had explained to Ferracini. "But they were both professional enough to put the job first."
The scientists had used Scholder's Morse system to signal for a reconnection. Then, in the machine's last operation before it was demolished, everyone who had been involved with Gatehouse had assembled there one final time to see Claud and Anna on their way.
They had invited Scholder to go with them to rejoin the world he had left as a young man long ago. But after much contemplation, Scholder had declined. Ferracini believed it was because of young Scholder, with the family that Scholder himself had once had. "This world is mine now—I'm getting too old to be gallivanting around among universes," Scholder had said. "And besides, Einstein isn't as young as he used to be, either. He needs someone to help him sail his boat."
Ferracini realized that Janet had stopped singing, and that people were crowding onto the dance floor as the band came back on with "String of Pearls". He saw Janet coming toward him through the crowd around the bar. She put her arms around his neck as he stood up from the stool, and they held each other for a long time. Then she stood back and looked at him. They both laughed, unable to find words.
Cassidy came over and broke the spell. "I'd have thought you two would have more to talk about than that after all this time," he drawled.
Janet slipped an arm around Cassidy's waist and kissed him on the cheek. She looked from one to the other. "It's amazing, neither of you looks a day older."
"Clean living, heathy food, and meditation." Cassidy told her.
"And you look just great, too," Ferracini said. "Better, in fact. How's Jeff?"
"Fine, last I heard," Janet said. "He joined the Navy. Right now he's somewhere in the Pacific."
"See, I said she knew you'd be back," Max said as he joined them.
"It was destiny," Janet said. "You believe in destiny, don't you, Harry?"
"Sure, Ferracini replied. "Destiny is what you make it."
Janet studied his face with her light, green-blue eyes. "So is it over now, whatever it was?" she asked him. "You went away like you said, and now you're back. Does that mean you're back for good?"
Harry Ferracini took in the scene around them and thought how different it all was from the last time he had been in the Rainbow's End. The Army was present in strength; there were a lot of Navy; some Air Corps; Marines. Three British sailors had just come in the door with a couple of Canadians; some Australians were sitting at the far end of the bar, and he could see Free French and Polish uniforms among the crowd on the dance floor.
As had been true before in England, it was everybody's war now. Even President Roosevelt, he'd heard, had one son flying in a reconnaissance squadron over Africa; another was an executive officer on one of the destroyers that had taken part in the North African landings; a third was serving with the Marines in the Solomons; and another was an ensign on the carrier Hornet. The world that he believed in was standing up and defending itself at last.
And he thought how different it all was from the future that he had once faced as he stared out at a bleak, rainswept dawn from the bridge of a submarine off Norfolk, Virginia.
He looked at Janet and grinned. "Oh, yes," he told her. "You don't have to worry about that anymore. I'm home to stay now."
EPILOGUE
DRIVING A CURRENT-MODEL 1947 Ford Mercury V8, Ferracini eased off the new highway and turned the car onto old, familiar streets of the Queens that he remembered. A lot of new houses were going up around the old area now, mainly single-family units on patches of green grass—the kind that the politicians were saying every American couple would own, now that the postwar economic collapse predicted by the doomsayers hadn't happened. Instead of making tanks and B-17s, the factories had switched to cars and refrigerators. Nobody worried about what would happen when everybody had one of everything; they'd start selling them two of everything, Ferracini supposed.
The news on the radio was talking about the Soviets' refusal to accept the plan that Marshall—secretary of state now—had announced for aiding European recovery, including Germany's. Ferracini changed channels to Bing Crosby singing "Don't Fence Me In".
The flowerpots still sat in the windows over what was still a bicycle shop. The liquor store and the hardware store hadn't changed. The delicatessen seemed to have expanded its business and had taken over the premises next door to become a neighborhood grocery. Ferracini parked in an empty space in front, got out of the car, and stopped to look around. Farther along, he could see the wall with the trees and the church behind
it, and the school at the bottom of the hill. The building that had been a laundry looked different, somehow. He crossed the sidewalk and entered the store.
A few people and some children were browsing among the self-serve shelves on one side. Ferracini spent a minute selecting a couple of items that Janet had asked him to pick up and walked over to the counter, where papers, magazines, candy, and tobacco were displayed. "Evening," the man with a black mustache and wearing a white coat greeted as he rang up the charge. "Anything else you need?"
"Just some information, maybe." Ferracini paused.
The storekeeper waited a moment, then looked at him questioningly. "Okay?"
"Do you happen to know if some people called Ferracini still live around here—farther down the street, almost to the corner?"
"Ferracini—the Italian people? Oh sure, I know them. She's in here all the time with the kids. Yeah, they're still there." The storekeeper squinted and leaned forward to look at Ferracini more closely. "You're part of the family, too, ain'tcha? I can see the resemblance."
"Kind of distant. But tell me, did they just have another baby there recently?"
"She should have—she's been carrying it for long enough. The storekeeper raised his voice to call through a door behind him. "Hey, Barb, did Mrs. Ferracini have her baby yet?"
A buxom woman appeared in the doorway. "Yes, a couple of days ago. It was a boy."
"How . . . how is she?" Ferracini asked.
"Who are you? Say, you have to be a relative. Haven't seen you around here before." The woman nodded. "She's okay— they both are. I hear she had a hard time, and the doctor was a bit worried there for a while, but she'll be fine now. Want me to say who was asking?"
Relieved, Ferracini smiled and shook his head. "It doesn't matter, thanks. I was just passing through."
On his way back to Manhattan, he stopped to get gas and phone Janet at their apartment on Riverside Drive. She was still singing, and Capitol Records was talking seriously about a contract. He and Cassidy had invested in some war-surplus planes and were running an air charter business.
"Queens!" Janet exclaimed. "I thought you were having a day off. What are you doing over in Queens?"
"My folks came from there, remember?"
"But you never talk about your family, Harry."
"Well, this was different. There was just something I had to do."
"Taking in a ball game with Cassidy and Russ, more likely."
"No, not this time. Like I said, it was something I had to do—somebody's birthday that I didn't want to forget just this one time. See you later, hon, okay? . . . Oh, and yes, I picked up those things you said you wanted."
* * *
TECHNICAL NOTE
The "Many-Worlds" Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
DESPITE ITS ENORMOUS PRACTICAL value and the success of its predictions, quantum theory is so contrary to everyday intuition that even after more than half a century, the experts themselves still can't agree what to make of it. The disagreement centers around the problem of describing "observations," by which physicists mean interactions in general.
Formally, the result of an interaction is a superposition of mathematical functions, each of which represents one of the possible outcomes. The difficulty to be resolved is that of reconciling such a superposition with the fact that in practice we observe only one outcome. In other words, how does the system (interacting bodies; apparatus and object; observer and observed) "choose" which of the possible final states to assume?
The "conventional," or "Copenhagen" interpretation is that whenever a wave function attains the form of a superposition, it immediately collapses to become one of the elements. Which element of the superposition it will collapse to is impossible to say in advance; a weighted probability distribution can be assigned to the various possibilities, however, and the predictions of such distributions have been amply verified by experiment. This is the basis of the familiar statistical nature of quantum mechanics.
The collapse of the wave function and the assignment of statistical weights do not follow from anything in quantum theory itself, but are consequences of an imposed a priori convention. This approach promotes the conclusion that the formalism of physical theory no longer represents reality, but reduces to a ghost-realm of potentialities—i.e., its symbols constitute merely convenient algorithms for making statistical predictions. But if this is correct, the critics ask, then what becomes of the objective reality that surely exists all around us? Einstein opposed this metaphysical solution of the Copenhagen school to his death, and his sentiments underlie much of the dissatisfaction that persists today with the conventional interpretation.
In his Princeton doctoral dissertation in 1957, Hugh Everett III proposed a new interpretation that denies the existence of a separate classical realm and asserts the notion of a wave function for the whole universe. This universal wave function never collapses, and hence reality as a whole is rigorously deterministic. By virtue of its evolution in time according to its dynamic differential equations, the universal function decomposes naturally into elements, and it is postulated that this process reflects a continual splitting of the universe into a multitude of mutually unobservable, but equally real worlds. It follows from the minimum-assumption mathematical treatment of this model that in each of these worlds the familiar statistical quantum laws will be found to apply.
In a sense, Everett's interpretation calls for a return to naive realism and the old-fashioned idea that there exists a direct correspondence between theoretical formalism and reality, which would doubtless have pleased Einstein. But maybe because physicists these days are more sophisticated, and certainly because the implications appear so bizarre, this alternative has not been taken as seriously as perhaps it deserves.
Its major weakness is that it leads to experimental predictions identical to those of the Copenhagen view, and therefore, no laboratory test can be designed to distinguish between the two. Indeed, the mathematics of the many-worlds interpretation yields formal proof that no experiment can reveal the existence of the other worlds contained in the universal superposition. (This, of course, is where I took the greatest license in The Proteus Operation; but that's one of the perks of being a science-fiction writer as opposed to a scientist.)
A decision between the two interpretations may, however, ultimately be possible on grounds other than direct laboratory experiment. For example, in the very early moments of the Big Bang, the universal wave function may have possessed an overall coherence unimpaired, as yet, by condensation into noninterfering branches. Such initial coherence may have testable implications for cosmology.
For further details, including a comprehensive mathematical treatment of the theory, see The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, edited by Bryce S. DeWitt and Neill Graham, published by Princeton University Press.
About the Author
Born in London in 1941, James P. Hogan worked as an aeronautical engineer specializing in electronics and for several major computer firms before turning to writing full-time in 1979. A Prometheus Award winner, he has won wide popularity for his novels with their blend of gripping storytelling and convincing scientific speculation.
Hogan currently makes his home in northern California.
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROTEUS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
> CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
EPILOGUE
TECHNICAL NOTE
The Proteus Operation Page 47
