by John Barnes
Al shook his head. “Here’s the part you’re not gonna believe, Mark. You said that in your timeline the atomic bomb came along in 1945, and they really only started working on it in earnest after America got into the war, right?”
“Right, pretty much so. There was some research before then, but it got into high gear after Pearl Harbor.”
“Pearl Harbor was—”
“Japanese sneak attack that started the war in my timeline. We lost a lot of the navy there. They bombed the harbor without warning on a Sunday morning.”
They all nodded solemnly; it was news to them, I guess.
“So,” Al said, “it took, what, four years to build the atomic bomb?”
“Yep. And the Germans were only about two years behind us, I remember reading once—the Soviets were in the race, too, but they were mostly running off stuff they stole from the American project, so they don’t exactly count.”
All of them looked at each other and shrugged. “And you’re sure you remember nothing about atomic bombs?”
“A little bit from high-school science and from my science requirement classes, maybe,” I said. “I told you, I’m not a nuclear physicist.”
Al sighed. “The reason we’re so amazed about this, Mark, is that obviously if the Germans had atomic bombs, they’d have cleaned out the Free Zone a long time ago. And they don’t. In fact, ‘atomic bombs’ are on the prohibited list as ‘Jewish science’—they were around in science fiction before the war, I can remember some stories I read as a kid, but they certainly never turned up in 1942 or 1943, when we really needed them, and the Germans never got them either. So this set of directions—well, Sheila said that’s what it was and we thought she was kidding, giving us a code word for it.”
Now it was my turn to goggle and stare. “You mean—I don’t believe it. As I recall it was expensive and difficult but it turned out to be pretty simple in the long run. Hell, in my timeline by 1975 India had made one.”
Al shook his head. “That’s both the thing that makes your story convincing and the thing that makes it baffling. There is no such thing in this timeline as an atomic bomb. You say your friend said the Closers won’t tolerate them? That’s as good an explanation as any, I suppose.”
“It’s because of the radiation,” I said. “Atomic bombs produce stuff called fallout, which gets everywhere—in the air, the water, eventually the food. It’s radioactive.”
They all looked a bit more puzzled than before, except for one guy who hadn’t spoken before. “I remember radioactivity. I used to teach high-school science before the war. It was a hot new area—for that matter all the science-fiction magazines were full of it. But after the war we got told it was all a monstrous piece of—”
“Jewish science,” Al finished. “Yeah, it all kind of fits. They want a world run by Nazis, and they want it without atomic bombs. So they came here, and played around …” Al groaned and stretched. “We have to go to bed. Tomorrow we have to get set to go meet that sub, and that will be a pretty full day of getting ready and then a long time up late. And besides, I’ve heard enough impossible things tonight to digest. Time agents, good and bad. Atomic bombs. A certain writer becoming a household name—”
They all laughed at that for no reason I could tell; one of them was blushing.
“—and on top of that, somebody that I think I actually hate more than I hate Nazis. Bedtime, boys and girls … we’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”
It was a busy day; they’d pretty much decided that since nothing looked good, they’d fold down the cell and disperse before it got worse. One of the guys had a big old truck that he used to go camping up in the mountains—he was secretly a Buddhist and liked to commune with things, he said—and that was going to be our vehicle for the trip. He managed to slip out about midday, get back to his vegetable stand (which he found smashed to bits with “Jooger!” written in paint all over it, and all the vegetables hurled out in the street), and discovered they at least hadn’t broken into his garage. As dusk was falling, he drove his truck back to the rear entrance of the Berkeley Free Library.
Meanwhile Al and Sandy and I had been getting everything incriminating into a small number of crates; the crates, in turn, would travel along with us, along with some gasoline and dynamite for destroying them if that became necessary. Our real security, however, was going to have to be not getting caught. There was just too much to destroy, otherwise.
The others had slipped away quietly during the day, except for one guy whose day cover was begging in the streets, a shaggy-haired (almost an inch long—a hippie by local standards) burly guy named Greg. He went along with one of the big tall ones to help out.
Dusk found us ready to load, and we did in about ten minutes; the truck bounced and thudded alarmingly in the potholed streets, with the three of us sitting huddled by the equipment. Al had assured me the homemade dynamite was fresh, and therefore hadn’t sweat any nitroglycerin and was reasonably safe. This was very reassuring because I was sitting on a box of it.
We got the rest of the cell in without incident, and without any noise other than that of the truck. Jaffy, the driver (it seemed to be a nickname, and I never did find out his real one), kept the headlights out and stuck to back streets, just creeping along. I suppose that would look suspicious to a cop … if he saw it. But nobody else would phone the police, because in this timeline, America had become the kind of place where something creeping past the house, in the middle of the night, lights out, and engine barely turning, was probably official business, and you didn’t want to know.
We stayed tense and quiet till we were out of the city, then, after a long while, Al said, in a quite normal voice, “We can probably talk now—no chance of a patrol out this way. We’ll just have to shut up when we start to get close to Half Moon Bay.”
Everyone chatted for a bit; nobody’s day had been too terribly frightening, because the first day of a big dragnet search was usually given over to Boy Scouts, Jaycees, Kiwanis, and so forth pogging the bohemian areas, in the hopes that it would flush something out from cover. The cops had done the usual roundup of the usual suspects, but most of the usual suspects were “baxters,” as Al called them.
“I’ve heard baxters mentioned before,” I said. “What are they?”
“Honestly, when I saw that .45 I thought you might be one. They’re people who’ve slipped the trolley a little bit; they start to imagine that they’re living before the war, or during the war. They have a tendency to make speeches in public and to run around waving rusty weapons for which they don’t have any ammunition. They’re kind of sad … but proud, too. Magnificent madmen who won’t let time kill their country.”
I liked the phrase, and complimented him on it. “Thank you,” he said. “I try.”
“Al,” one of the men sitting in the darkness said, “do you suppose—well, look, this might be our last time when we’re all together, right? I mean it doesn’t look good. Sheila probably did get caught, and you know what they say, after two days, anyone will talk. So … uh, could we all hear it one more time? I know you buried copies of it in a couple of places, but I like it when you recite it, and I’m afraid I’ll never hear it again.”
The truck bounced along on the rutted highway; it was clear that Reconstruction hadn’t involved building anything like the interstates, or even keeping up what was already there. Under the canvas cover, it was warm from all the bodies, but cold drafts blew in from little crevices. Al was quiet for a long time.
“You really, really flatter me. Do you realize that?”
“We all want to hear it, Al,” someone else said, then Sandy chimed in, and finally I said, “Whatever it is, my curiosity is overpowering now. I want to hear it to.”
Al, beside me, nodded, and said, “All right then, let me get the trusty canteen beside me, so I can drink while I do this … and I think there will be time before we get to Half Moon Bay, for both parts if you want them.”
“We want them,” Sand
y said, firmly, and it seemed to be settled.
He took a long swig of water. I got a funny feeling in my stomach, like something was going to happen, and then he began to speak.
It was beautiful.
10
I am not a poet, or even a poetry lover. Lit classes never taught me to like it. And I don’t remember it well, so though I was to hear it a few more times, one way and another, I couldn’t recite it or quote it.
So you will just have to trust me that it was beautiful, and let me tell you what was in it, and a little bit (which I mostly learned later) about how Al came to write it.
But if you want to imagine my first experience of it, you have to imagine this: Al is speaking right next to you, and his voice loses that strange, slightly whiny quality and becomes deep and resonant. Four others of the bravest people you will ever know are sitting so close to you you can feel the warmth of their bodies. The truck slams and bounces every now and then, and Al has to back up and repeat a couple of lines, but he does it so gracefully and stays so much on the beat that you feel like the bumps and jars are part of the performance.
Every so often you are reminded, by the back of your mind, that you are sitting on about seventy pounds of dynamite.
And as the truck winds its way down the peninsula roads, taking the least-traveled whenever it can, you get glimpses, through the open canvas back, of billions of bright August stars, and of silhouettes of pine trees and mountains.
The poem was in two parts. The first was called, simply, “The Fall.” It began with the assassination of President Roosevelt—a crime still unsolved—in 1936, right after the election. It narrated the following events:
Nobody was quite certain that it was the Nazis who shot Franklin Roosevelt as he rode in an open motorcade in New York City in June 1937. There was no suspicion of it at the time. Indeed, no one was even sure where the shots had come from; the street was noisy and there were so many windows open on so many high buildings that it was unknowable.
They seemed to be ready for it, all the same; within a day they had hate literature out blaming it all on the Jews, and there were anti-Jewish riots here and there around the country.
(It took me a while to figure it out, but it appeared that one critical variable in the whole thing—something that made me suspect the Closers had been working with the Nazis in this timeline for a long time—was that their subversion and propaganda was a lot more effective. They clearly were much more effective at stirring up race and religious hatred in the USA during that time than they ever were in our history.)
The new President was John Nance Garner, a Texas isolationist who was noted for devotion to the oil companies. As an isolationist, he refused to even comment on the Munich deal that surrendered Czechoslovakia to the Nazis.
But when, in October 1938, the coup by General Saturnino Cedillo overthrew President Cardenas of Mexico, and the Mexican Fascist Gold Shirts came to power, Americans found out just which of President Garner’s loyalties came first. Cedillo immediately pledged to break up the Mexican government’s monopoly on oil production, Pemex, which had been seized from American and European private corporations, and then to return the pieces to foreign investors, Mexico went up in rebellion—and Garner sent the army to back Cedillo. American planes bombed unarmed civilian crowds in Guadalajara; Cedillo kept power backed by one large part of the Mexican Army and by Garner.
The United States went up in a storm of political controversy—it sounded to me like the Vietnam protests but twenty times bigger. Garner had already canceled most of the New Deal, and there had been anger over that, but American troops fighting and dying to keep an avowed fascist and close friend of Goebbels in power was more than could be borne.
The Democrats had become isolationist; the Republicans outflanked them by becoming ultraisolationist. In 1940, to everyone’s surprise, the Republican candidate was Charles A. Lindbergh, prominent as a heroic pilot and public conservative—and member of many, many organizations with Nazi ties.
The situation was so bad that the only nonisolationist party by then was the Socialists, and they actually carried a couple of states. It didn’t matter. On a platform of “peace with honor” and “bring the boys back from Mexico,” Lindbergh won.
But the news from Europe was bad—worse than anyone could have imagined.
Al’s voice recounted all this in a rolling, singing cadence, and through his eyes we saw America become imperialist, saw the army squandered in Mexico—Garner could keep the forces there but he couldn’t get additional money out of Congress, so ammunition, aircraft, weapons, and lives were lost and not replaced—saw the horror of Americans presented only with a choice of an imperialist or a fascist sympathizer …
And gave us the horror that poured in over the radio from Europe.
(Again, it was much later that I learned from ATN sources that the Closers had been working with the Nazis since 1932. What they had done was to copy plans and devices developed by Germany at the very end of World War II, and transfer them back to the German Armed Forces of 1932; the easiest technology to learn is one that is an extension of your own.)
The Nazis began World War II with short-range jet fighters, a Focke-Wulf fighter plane called the FW-187 that beat the Spitfire by far in every possible category, big heavy bombers, snorkel submarines with underwater communication systems so that they could coordinate while submerged—and the V-1 “buzz bomb,” modified into a television-guided homing weapon.
Al rattled it off in a litany; the Germans contemptuously ignored Poland in 1939 and struck west and north. France, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden had fallen before Christmas; every one of those nations had a long-ago-prepared pro-Nazi government ready to take power, like Vichy France and Quisling’s Norway in our timeline, but far better prepared; within a year, France would be rearming—on the German side.
The British Army in France couldn’t be evacuated due to the stormy winter weather. There was no “miracle at Dunkirk”—most of Britain’s combat-ready units ended up in German POW camps.
Again, with contemptuous ease, Hitler gobbled up Poland in the first two weeks of January 1940, after cutting his infamous deal with Stalin.
As in our world, the summer of 1940 was the Battle of Britain, but this time with a difference: the RAF was hopelessly outgunned. The V-1s could be shot down by airplanes, barely, but they were operated by remote pilots looking through TV cameras in the nose, and they hit with deadly effect; the London dockyards burned most nights.
And when the RAF rose against the V-1s, they rose to face Me-262s and FW-187s; they were hopelessly outclassed, and they fell out of the sky.
By late June, the Chamberlain government that had done so much to make sure Britain entered the war unprepared had collapsed, but instead of Churchill, the British got Lord Halifax—a man interested in negotiating a surrender.
It didn’t happen, and here Al’s voice rose in triumph, and I found my heart beating faster as I heard of the “miracle” that saved Britain.
It was only betrayal at the top that had made America useless to her traditional British friends, and there were people who did not like that … among them, Howard Hughes, the Rockefellers, and Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors. In defiance of the federal government, they organized a giant financial consortium to arm Britain against the Nazis. In a crash program, Hughes had produced the first Allied jet fighters by the summer of 1940, and Sloan had them rolling off the assembly lines at twenty per day—on money borrowed with no security from the Rockefellers. Moreover, they had copied the German use of drop tanks and gone it one better—the new airplanes, the P-100 American Eagles, could fly, just barely, all the way to Britain from Labrador.
The offer was straightforward and simple: the British government could lease as many P-100s as the Consortium could build, for a dollar a year and a promise to buy them at cost plus 10 percent within five years of the end of the war. They would cost Britain nothing while the fighting was going on.
The Halifax government, bent on surrender, tried to refuse the offer—and the Miracle of Britain happened.
The Labour Party had never wanted to surrender. Neither had the Churchill wing of the Conservatives. When it was announced that Halifax was opening negotiations and wasn’t taking the Consortium’s offer, British unions rose up in a general strike to put an end to that, and after an uproar in Parliament, within days Churchill was prime minister—months later than he was in our timeline.
During all this, President Garner thumped his desk, declared our business was in this hemisphere, and extended no aid to Britain. And presidential candidate Lindbergh went him one better by saying we didn’t have any business in the hemisphere, either.
Garner tried to block the transfer of the planes, but the P-100s taking off from Detroit were far more than a match for the antiquated P-40s he might have used to stop them. They were touching down in Labrador within hours, refueling, and strapping on drop tanks—and what the British called “Miracle Night” happened on August 30, 1940.
Four hundred P-100s—more of them than Britain had ever had of Spitfires—arrived early in the morning, flying secretly into fields in Scotland and the northwest. Their pilots slept in pup tents on the fields while the mechanics who had flown over just two days before readied them for action.
That night, the P-100s screamed in to meet the German attackers. They overmatched the FW-187 by far, and sent them tumbling from the sky; they were about even with the Me-262, but the P-100s hadn’t had to run as far and were flying over friendly territory. It was the first great battle of jet aircraft in history, and Britain won it. The surviving Luftwaffe raced back across the North Sea with its tail between its legs.
With P-100s covering, the old Hurricanes, Spitfires, and Typhoons swarmed into the sky to destroy the deadly V-1s. London slept well that night.
The Bridsh crews were exhausted, their planes pushing their safety margins, and yet they would never get a better chance; they landed and leaped from their planes to help the ground crews refuel, strap on fresh drop tanks, and rearm the planes. The bombers had been lost, mostly, in the futile and disastrous attempts to bomb the V-1 launching sites, but every bomber that could be pulled off submarine patrol was along on the mission, too, and every old plane that could fly and carry a bomb or a torpedo.
