by John Barnes
I came out of the smoldering village just in time to see them coming over the more distant mountains.
They were not troop transports. The Nazis had taken another big leap in technology, or more likely their Closer masters had done so, and what these things looked like was a sort of distant relative of the B-52. They were coming in fairly low, and not yet in range, but I didn’t think I was going to be able to get all of them. Moreover, three of our launchpads were out that way, and if they let loose with their bombs, they would get at least those pads, and probably several more. Even with the SHAKK, I could hurt them, but I could not stop them.
Bursts of heavy firing came from behind me; I ran back to the tower and bellowed questions into the field telephone, but it was nothing to be worried about—merely Bigeard and his troops sweeping the landing field clear of the remaining resistance. The enemy in the northern drop zone were already surrendering.
I dashed back, out of breath, smoke searing my lungs and making my eyes water, so that when I got into fresh air the first things I had to do were to retch and wipe my eyes.
The bombers were closer still, hanging like metallic vultures above the distant blue-green hills. They would be able to hammer several of the launchpads before I could even get one shot off, and, in fact, if they split up and circled, they could probably get every missile in the valley—and with the missiles, the last hope for this timeline.
Behind me, the gate of the secure compound opened, and the damnedest thing I had ever seen in my life came rolling out. It was a plain old GM truck, of the kind we saw a lot of here, probably shipped to Russia, captured by the Germans, donated to Japan, captured by the Free Zone forces. The engine was hammering away trying to drag the outsized load on its back.
But the truck itself was just a frame of normality around the deep weirdness of what sat on its bed. It might have been half of a “Martian invader” from some old fifties sci-fi flick, or the metal clam-plate top of the Closer tank I had blasted, glued to a lot of old auto parts, or possibly an entire junk sculpture collection rammed together, welded at random points, and placed under an aluminum awning to keep the rain off. Behind it trailed a cable as thick as my waist, winding off a spool ten feet tall. The top had something on it that looked like a telescope poking out of an observatory in an old cartoon, except that there was a dark hole right in the center of the lens.
And just above the dome of it, three radar antennas were spinning madly. It couldn’t have looked any screwier if it had had six eggbeaters, a set of Christmas tree lights, and a steam whistle attached to it; it looked like what happens when somebody scrambles all the parts of thirty modeling kits and hands a chimp a tube of glue.
Or two tubes of glue, one of which the chimp sniffs before beginning.
Driving this whole mad contraption, wearing a shabby black suit and pair of sneakers that made him look like he was trying to dress up as a punk rocker and not succeeding, was Dr. Edward Teller. As they reached the end of the cord—that was the only way I could explain that huge thing trailing off the end—Teller braked to a stop, leaped out, and ran around to an instrument panel mounted on the side.
The whirling radar antennas sped up. The dome itself crept about, moved up and down, and a bright light flashed a few times in the muzzle of the “telescope.” Then he nodded, appeared to hesitate an instant, and pushed a button.
I’ve heard thunder up close and been on mountains during thunderstorms. Once in Oman, on a dig by the sea, I got to see a waterspout, and once in Iowa, had to take cover in a ditch when a tornado passed close by. I’d heard more big explosions than I ever wanted to hear again.
This dwarfed them. It was a brief, stuttering roar, over in less than two seconds, but in that short time it made my ears bleed; some of the older land mines around the valley were detonated by the vibrations.
I looked up to see that all seventeen of the bombers had exploded. There was no one part of them that went first—a fuel tank, bomb, or engine—spreading to the rest. Each whole bomber had become so hot on its surface that the air next to it was superheated and flashed outward, which was the first part of the explosion, and the reason why there was such a bright flash of white light first; then the heat, conducted inside in milliseconds, detonated all the explosives, the fuel, the liquids in the hydraulic lines, the lubricants, the plastic seat cushions, creating a yellow-red explosion that swelled into a great, pulsing fireball, which then evaporated into dark smoke and a rain of bits of melted metal and charred cinders.
Dr. Teller’s little device fired ten shots per second at ten separate targets, under radar control, so presumably the whole thing took 1.6 seconds for the bomber squadron.
There was a very long pause while the implications sank in. Then all those of us who could see Dr. Teller began to cheer. He got up on the truck, clenched his fists over his head like a prizefighter, and jumped back down.
He walked straight toward me, for some reason or other. His hand was out, and since he extended it to me, I shook it. From the roar that his gadget had made when it fired, I was still a bit deaf, and so was he, so he leaned in close to say, “And we owe this one to you, Mr. Strang. Not to mention that I’m quite confident about the results for me as soon as the Nobel Committee convenes after the war.”
“The Nobel … owe it to me …”
“Of course. You’re the one who told me about the whole idea, remember? The lasers of your own world. Once you told me what they did, building one was easier than I thought it would be. The biggest problem was coming up with the device to pump it, and it took me forever to realize that you must do it with nuclear fusion—nothing else would have the power density I needed—and that it couldn’t be fusion in a plasma, had to happen in a normal state of matter. Once I got the cold fusion idea doped out—took me the better part of a week, and if I hadn’t gotten it last Wednesday I was going to call you and ask you for a hint—”
“Cold fusion?” I said. “This thing runs by cold fusion?”
“The amplifier does,” he said. “I still need a huge current surge to start it, which is why I have that silly cord rigged up to the back there. Now, come on, there’s no other way a device of this kind could be powered. That’s crystal clear from the equations. You said it was coherent light—I know you didn’t say coherent light, but that was clearly what you described—and commonplace in your world—”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a laser one one-thousandth the power of this,” I said, almost whispering. “This is like something …” I was going to say “something for SDI,” but I suspected it was bigger, and, anyway, the term wouldn’t mean anything to him. “This is like something out of science fiction. I mean, I’ve seen ten-watt and hundred-watt lasers—”
Now he stared at me. “But didn’t you say—oh, god, no, you didn’t. I’ve been doing weapons work so long I just assumed that if you couldn’t shoot it at someone, no one would build it.” He sat down; he looked as dazed as I felt. “The first day back on the Arizona I hit on the idea of something that would work like that, but it would be so difficult to make it big enough to use as a weapon that I gave up on that line, especially because when I thought of this other way … then you don’t have anything like this?”
“We don’t have cold fusion, either.”
“Good thing I didn’t call you for a hint, then,” he said. He still looked a little dazed.
He was right, though. The next year when they had reorganized the Nobel Prizes, they gave him three years’ worth at a clip, for 1958-60 inclusive. By that time he’d gotten over the shock a bit.
When Teller’s laser destroyed the oncoming bombers, von Braun’s group was only hours away from loading the warheads onto the missiles. I’ve found that when I describe my feelings to people, they just don’t understand, but that night as I watched twenty-four columns of fire rise into the sky, I was only happy. I knew they had equipped them with huge warheads, gratuitously big to, in Churchill’s phrase, “make the rubble bounce.” In that
timeline, Berlin became the site of a crater you could easily see from the moon, and Germany itself a radioactive wasteland for generations after.
Al and I had a sizable argument about that one, though we stayed friends; he just didn’t have a bitter, hateful bone in his body when you came right down to it. I figured I had more than enough for two of us. Anyway, there are those who think his “Pillars of Fire” is as good as “The Fall” and “The Gathering of Nations,” but I suppose I’m too partisan to see it that way. No ear for poetry, as I’ve said.
As the missiles tore Nazi Germany from the face of the Earth and the pages of history, the other fascist nations were not spared, either. But Germany took the brunt, and then the major Axis military facilities. Moreover, the Free Zone Forces had hundreds of tactical nukes, and they weren’t shy about using them; in a few weeks’ time, they had retaken the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand, driven the Japanese out of China and the Axis puppet regime out of India, and accepted the surrender of the Empire of Japan.
Everywhere people rose against their tormentors. After Buenos Aires vanished in a mushroom cloud, Brazil rose as one nation and struck southward, avenging the wrongs of twenty years; I was privately amused to hear Brazilians blame the Argentines for the destruction of rain forests, and to see Brazil acquire a reputation as a nation of environmental nuts.
Patton’s invasion of the United States ranks as a political masterpiece in its execution; his terms were so unrelentingly harsh that most of the quiet Nazis and cryptofascists, the people for whom the occupation and Reconstruction had been excuses to practice the bigotry they had believed in all along, were too frightened to allow the puppet regime in Washington to accept.
I once heard a man in a bar complaining that Patton could have taken the country back without a shot fired—but if he had, the fascists would have been voting in it. I made that point clear to the gentleman by slugging him, and used my political pull to beat the rap.
Instead of trying to mollify the fears of the eighteen million strong American Nazi Party, he provoked them into meeting him head-on. Patton announced he was going to free all the remaining black Americans in the labor camps and give them first choice of land confiscated from the Nazis. He promised that no former Nazi would ever vote, hold office, or own property again.
Then, to tempt them to try their luck, he pledged he would not use nuclear weapons on American soil—and didn’t.
It still took him less than a hundred days to trap their army in the desert and tear it to pieces, and the huge losses he inflicted simply meant that any of them with the courage to fight was probably dead. It was swift, brutal, and did the job—it was like him.
Anyway, I voted for him in the first free election. It was a hard choice; I had gotten to like Captain Kennedy, too.
16
The story could have stopped right there. I learned long afterward, from von Braun, that what they had used the SHAKK to do was to chemically separate plutonium—they had simply put high-level reactor waste in the drawer, closed it, and let the weapon spit out all the things it didn’t want, separately. In a week of this they had obtained many tons of weapons-grade plutonium, and that had made the difference.
The Closers who had been in that timeline probably died in Berlin, or were now so far underground we hadn’t a prayer of catching them for a few generations. At any rate, they would never want this timeline or any of its descendants to colonize again—too many nukes had gone off. It was about the equivalent of an extra dental X-ray per year, spread around, and well worth it from my viewpoint.
But one day, two years later, I was at a Victory Day celebration—just as I had the year before, I told my class at Yale that I hated having to take time out to go to that thing. They never believed me, and they were right.
Patton had won the election the fall before, and there were more American flags—with stars and not swastikas—than I had ever seen before lining Pennsylvania Avenue. The postwar problems were setting in—everything was either in short supply or needed to be done now—but spirits were up.
I was walking along in the crowd and noticing that attractive women running out to kiss me was more fun than it used to be, when one very attractive woman slipped her arm into mine and said, “Hi, remember me?”
It was Ariadne Lao, the ATN Special Agent.
“I sure do. So you found this timeline again.”
“Unhhunh. Where can I meet you to talk with you, say, later in the week?”
I told her my new address, and she quietly wrote it down. “Enjoy the parade—I don’t think anyone’s earned it more thoroughly.” And she vanished into the crowd.
It was three days before she turned up; in that time, I did a lot of thinking but reached no conclusions.
She was dressed like any female colleague would be, in a simple skirt and blouse and sneakers. There was sort of a cultural uproar happening out there, as America rediscovered jazz and everything black, and as fashions stopped being either military or “normal.” But it hadn’t much hit the campuses yet.
She sat down, let me make and pour coffee for her—one wonderful thing the old Free Zone had had in abundance, and which they were happily exporting to the free USA—and said, “Goodness, where do we start? First of all, I really must apologize for the entire situation—you were supposed to be a local assistant for poor Citizen Skena and instead you ended up in all of this. For what it’s worth, we’ve given you extended hazardous duty pay that’s still piling up for you back in the ATN timeline.”
“Do I have to spend it there?”
“You might want to—there are many nice things that aren’t available in a lot of other timelines—but no, it’s fully convertible. You can take it in gold, silver, plutonium, germanium, platinum, or gallium and turn it into the currency of wherever you want to go; in fact we can handle that for you. In your home timeline, converting to platinum and then to dollars, you’ve got about ten million dollars; in this one, with postwar inflation and so forth, more like a billion.”
I gave a low whistle, and I meant it; that was a pretty impressive deal.
“The question,” she said, crossing her legs, which were great legs in my opinion, “is what you want to do. Let me explain it to you simply. We don’t recruit a lot of people from outside the ATN timeline, and when we do it’s generally someone who has been an agent for us inside their own timeline and has a lot of promise, Mr. Strang.
“Your case is truly strange. There are three categories of agents we maintain—the Time Scouts are the ones like Sheila, who go into timelines that have not yet been explored to find out whether there is any Closer presence and any possibility of getting the timeline to join the Alliance. Their skills are mostly at blending in without very many clues as to their surroundings, and then at finding the people closest to the ATN viewpoint.
“Special Agents like Harry Skena go in after Time Scouts have reconnoitered; they go in very well prepared and with specific missions—in Harry’s case it was to block Blade and to find out what the Closers were up to in your timeline. They have much greater resources at their disposal, but they only stay a short while to accomplish a particular thing.
“And then there are the ones like me—Crux Ops. We have to be a bit of both, because what we are is Search and Rescue. Every so often a Time Scout or Special Agent runs into bad luck or gets careless—or sometimes is just a little incompetent. When that happens, they disappear and stop signaling. That’s when we send in a Crux Op. A Crux Op always has a simple mission, three parts. One, find out what happened to our missing agent. Two, retrieve the agent or, if the agent is dead, retrieve the agent’s body. And three, accomplish the agent’s original mission.
“Now it occurs to us, in Crux Recovery Operations, Mr. Strang, that you have essentially done the job of a Crux Op with no training, no mandate, and no requirement that you do so. This impresses us very much. More than half of Crux Ops wipe out on their first missions, and only one out of ten people makes it through Crux
Op training, and yet you—somehow—managed to be a very effective Crux Op with no training at all and no knowledge of the job.”
“What was her original mission?”
“To move this world toward eliminating the Nazis and to prepare the way for friendly contacts with ATN. And, incidentally, to hand the Closers a big defeat, because they’ve been very arrogant lately.”
I had to concede I had done at least that much.
“So here is the deal, Mr. Strang. We offer it freely. You have a job with us if you want it. We would be happy if you wanted to be a Time Scout or a Special Agent, since to do a Crux Op’s job you have to be able to do either of the other as well, but what we really want you for is a Crux Op. The pay is superb, as you might have figured out from what accumulated while you were gone, and some people actually like the opportunity to see how many other ways history could have been. You have your choice of basing—here, your home timeline, or any other—and a certain amount of freedom in visiting other timelines.
“Since you are a widower, I will caution you that it generally does not work out well if you try to find a timeline that contains your spouse but in which you never met her; we won’t try to stop you, but we will warn you that the results are usually emotionally disastrous. You approach her already deeply in love and knowing a great deal about her, but she is not exactly the person you loved, and you are not, perhaps, so much to her taste, and you assume too much … it is better to let the one you knew go than to look for another. So hunting for your lost spouse, alas, is not one of the benefits you can expect.”
I nodded and thought about it for the first time in ages. A lot had changed for me since coming to this timeline; Marie had been part of an innocent, younger me, and I was chagrined to admit how little I had really known about her—I had known her body, her background, and her eccentricities, and I had told myself I was in love with her, but I was in love with the trappings—I never really knew the person under them.
