Weapons of choice aot-1

by John Birmingham

  "You know, Admiral, your world is still here," said the scientist. He rubbed the tips of his fingers together. "It is this close, right here and now. You came here. You can get back. You have family, yes?"

  Another streetcar clattered past. Old car horns blared. Wilshire looked like the venue for a vintage auto festival.

  "My wife lives over in Santa Monica. Or she… well, you know."

  "Are you going to be okay, sir?" asked Flint. "Would you like to go back to the lobby and sit down?"

  Kolhammer drew in a long, deep breath. He could smell gasoline and exhaust fumes, but they stood out against a clear background. To his twenty-first-century sinuses, the air was mountain fresh. He gathered himself together and nodded across the street to the bizarre dome of the Brown Derby Restaurant.

  "Is that the original Brown Derby?" he asked.

  Neither Flint nor Einstein knew.

  "Is it supposed to be a hat?" asked Einstein.

  "Well, the sign says EAT IN THE HAT. If you're hungry, Professor, we could get a light lunch over there. They might've invented the Cobb salad by now. They're the guys who came up with it in the first place."

  As they crossed the street, Kolhammer could have sworn he caught sight of a young Ronald Reagan taking a seat in the restaurant's tree-shaded courtyard fronting on the street. He suddenly worried that this was going to be a Hollywood place, where they stood no chance of gaining entry. Einstein might even suffer from some egregious episode of discrimination-being Jewish, and wearing slippers as he was.

  He needn't have bothered himself over it. Agent Flint pushed through a small group of young women hanging around the front steps, clutching autograph books and occasionally standing on tiptoe as they tried to peer in through the swinging doors. The girls ignored Kolhammer, but a couple of them gave Einstein a quizzical look as he followed the admiral inside.

  Kolhammer watched as Special Agent Flint badged the first dish monkey in a white tux he came across. He couldn't hear the exchange, but the waiter's palpable reluctance-to admit a strange old man into such refined company-ran headlong into Agent Flint's hard-boiled refusal to take no for an answer. A maitre d' came over to buy into the scene. Flint flashed him the badge, as well, then gripped the man's bicep so strongly his knuckles turned white. He leaned over to mutter something into the man's ear, jerking his head back at Kolhammer and Einstein. The headwaiter began nodding vigorously, then shaking his head, then nodding again.

  "I wish I knew how to do that," whispered Einstein.

  "Confidence is half the battle," said Kolhammer. "This is my treat, by the way."

  Flint returned, the ghost of a smile playing across his features.

  "They found a nice table for you out on the terrace," he said. "Right next to Mr. Crosby's party."

  Einstein didn't visibly react to the news. Perhaps he wasn't a Bing fan. Kolhammer nodded once, briefly, trying to conceal a sensation of free fall. He'd already checked out the Reagan look-alike. It wasn't the future president. But there were a couple of familiar faces out on the sun-dappled balcony. He couldn't place them, but he was certain that he knew three or four of them from somewhere. It had to be from old movies. Marie loved them. She had about a thousand on video sticks back home.

  They threaded though the nearly empty dining room, with its walls completely covered by hundreds of framed sketches of movie stars, and out into the fierce radiance of high summer in LA. The patio was already buzzing with lunchtime trade. Kolhammer squinted into the sun to hide a mild grin at the sight of the food. A goodly number of the guests were tucking into hot dogs and cheeseburgers. He wondered how he'd go ordering a truffle-infused salad of wild porcini mushroom on arugula and witlof, or a bowl of hokkien noodles and wilted bok choy with flash-fried tofu croutons-two of the menu options in his stateroom back on the Clinton.

  Agent Flint showed them to a table, blocking the waiter with his body until both men had sat down.

  "Are you not joining us?" asked Einstein.

  "I'll be around," he said, before giving the waiter a glare and disappearing back inside. Kolhammer tried not to stare. But it was true. At the table next to them sat Bing Crosby and a party of three. The crooner, who looked impossibly young to Kolhammer, had split his lip recently. His guests, two men and a woman, gaped openly at the military man and the badly dressed oddball. They had been discussing something quite intently, but now they just stared. An uncomfortable silence began to spread to other nearby tables. The waiter started to shift from one foot to another, glancing back inside the main dining room.

  Kolhammer stood up, gave Crosby the benefit of a scornful look, informed by his awareness of the actor's violent, drunken home life, then smiled and said, "Mr. Crosby, you seem to recognize my colleague here. It's Professor Albert Einstein, winner of the Nobel prize for physics. He's helping us with the war effort."

  Crosby flushed a deep shade of red, and stammered a greeting.

  "Professor. Pleased to make your acquaintance."

  Einstein grinned hugely, nodded hello, and said to the waiter, "I'll have what he's having. If that is the famous Corncob salad."

  The waiter coughed nervously. "It's a Cobb salad, sir. Named after Mr. Cobb, the owner. There's no corn in it."

  "The professor will have the salad. Just bring me a coffee," said Kolhammer in his unmistakable command voice.

  Crosby's table went back to discussing some new record or film deal.

  Kolhammer sat down and cocked an eyebrow at Einstein. He leaned across the table and rumbled in a voice loud enough to be heard by the nearest tables: "The guy earns more money than God, everyone thinks he's a saint, but he gets loaded and beats on his wife and kids. Go figure."

  Crosby gawked at them, openmouthed, for a long, long time. Then he angrily waved over the maitre d'.

  "We'll be leaving," he said curtly. "Don't bother to make up the check."

  His companions all stood as one, and beat a confused retreat.

  Kolhammer grinned at Einstein. "I never did have time for assholes like that… Anyway, screw them. We're not here to gape at the movie stars. I needed to talk over a few things, Professor. Did you get through all of the README file on your data slate?"

  PRESIDENTIAL SUITE, AMBASSADOR HOTEL, LOS ANGELES, 9 JUNE 1942

  The heavy brocade curtains of the suite had been drawn against the fierce California sunshine. Each lens of President Roosevelt's glasses picked up the glow of the data slate screen, so that his eyes were lost behind the reflected oblongs. General George C. Marshall, perched on an imitation Louis XIV footstool just across from the commander in chief, fought down a childish urge to jump up and look over Roosevelt's shoulder.

  "It's quite amazing," the president said. "Do you know they've sent nearly a hundred motion pictures, and thousands of books, all inside this box?"

  Marshall, who'd just arrived from Washington, shook his head a fraction. He was still spinning from the cables he'd read on the flight over. He wasn't sure what had most upset him, the loss of the fleet or the arrival of the time travelers.

  Goddamn!

  Time travelers. Every time he used that cockamamie phrase he wanted to slap some sense into himself. But Roosevelt, King, and Eisenhower had all been out at the airfield when the rocket planes had come in. Eisenhower was still out at Muroc with Kolhammer's people and a dozen staff officers who'd flown across the continent overnight. King and the president, alone in the luxury suite except for the ubiquitous Secret Service detail, were still talking excitedly about the planes when Marshall arrived. And they weren't the only ones.

  Down in Australia, MacArthur was already on the warpath, beating the drum so loudly you could hear him across the Pacific. He wanted Kolhammer's marines, the tanks, the planes. Everything. He wanted to take them to Tokyo next week. Marshall felt like he was a long way behind in the game of catch-up.

  He snuck a glance at Admiral King. The navy chief and MacArthur openly despised each other, but there was an issue on which they were of one mind. Jap
an first. Marshall, who knew the real threat lay in Nazi Germany, was expecting to get caught in a pincer movement between them.

  Despite the terrible losses at Midway, King seemed to have reconciled himself to the changed circumstances. He'd already presented the Joint Chiefs with his broad recommendations for deployment of the new assets. Unsurprisingly, under King's proposal none of them, not even the British forces that arrived with Kolhammer, would find their way back to the Atlantic. The old dog had even suggested allowing Kolhammer to retain control of his task force as an integrated unit, just to keep the ships together and concentrated in King's personal fiefdom, the Pacific.

  If Marshall weren't careful and quick, Roosevelt would probably back the shift in strategy, just to regain some control over the runaway course of events.

  The president certainly was taken with that electrical book, or whatever in hell it was.

  "Will you look at this, General Marshall?" Roosevelt said with real wonder. "A space rocket to Mars."

  24

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, 1055 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

  For just a second or two after that first moment of clarity, Lieutenant Rachel Nguyen had actually been relieved that, for the time being at least, she wouldn't have to write a doctoral thesis. Moment of clarity-also known as the "Oh, no" moment-was the term Margie Francois had coined for those few seconds of dizzying intellectual free fall that came on when you realized deep down in your bones that you had fallen through a hole in the universe. If you were going to check out for good, they said, you were mostly likely to do so within thirty minutes of your own moment of clarity.

  After her momentary spurt of guilty glee, Rachel's reaction had shifted back toward the average, a mix of bewilderment and grief. Her first rational thought had been for her mother and father, who'd alternated between pride and alarm when confronted by their daughter's choice of a career in the navy. She was the only Nguyen daughter, and they'd been aghast at the possibility of losing her. Well, she thought ruefully, they've lost me now. She wasn't dead, but she felt so utterly lost it seemed as if she might as well be.

  Such was her mood when the two reporters knocked on the door of her temporary office aboard the Clinton where she'd been transferred to work with a small group of history graduates. There was no escaping her damn degree.

  "Hey, are you Rachel?" asked one of them. "I'm Julia Duffy, and this is Rosanna Natoli. The Hammer said we should come down and help you out."

  "Cool," Nguyen said, though without much enthusiasm.

  "Hey," Natoli said, "you an Aussie?"

  Rachel glanced down at the shoulder patch displaying her national flag.

  "Apparently."

  "My cousin Stella married an Aussie. They moved to Melbourne. You from there? You might know them."

  "Yeah, Stella from Melbourne. Everyone knows her."

  "Jeez," said Duffy, "you're a bright beam of sunshine aren't you, Lieutenant."

  "I'm sorry," said Rachel. "I was just thinking about my oldies. You know, my parents."

  Natoli pulled a chair out, patted Rachel on the arm, and launched into a therapeutic routine that consisted of endless, labyrinthine tales of her five sisters' weddings and her own plans to get to New York as soon as possible to find her grandparents and tell them to invest in IBM. Julia Duffy drifted about the small office, which was fitted out with half a dozen workstations and a large whiteboard Nguyen had been filling up with a local time line of the last month and the next two.

  "Are you the only one working on this, Rachel? Do you mind us calling you Rachel?" Duffy asked during a lull in the Natoli family saga.

  "No. It's my name. And there's another three of us on this project. I'm just the only one who's here right now. There's two Yanks and a Brit. We've all got doctoral qualifications in history, or were going for them when this shit went down."

  "You don't look old enough," said Duffy.

  "I was still going for mine. Had a thesis due in a few months. It was killing me."

  "There you go!" said Natoli. "A silver lining."

  "And look," said Duffy, jerking her thumb at the board as she sat down, "you can do field research for your PhD. Talk about winning the lottery."

  "You guys, don't seem overly upset," said Nguyen, intrigued by their chirpiness.

  "Antidepressants," Duffy said, smiling sweetly. "Come and see us when they run out. That'll be a dark fucking day."

  "So why are you guys here?" asked Nguyen. "Kolhammer promised us more hands, but nobody said anything about civilians."

  Duffy shrugged. "They won't let us talk to our offices. Well, I guess most of us don't have offices now…"

  Natoli rolled her eyes.

  "So we volunteered to help. It's that, or stay locked in our cabins. I guess they figured this is where we'd do the least amount of damage. We're supposed to be writing some puff piece for the local yokels, explaining how the hell we got here. That took all of two hours. So now we got nothing to do, and I really don't want to go back to watching Rosanna's undies dry in our cabin."

  "Okay," said Nguyen. "You guys do any history at uni… sorry, in college?"

  "Not a scrap," said Duffy.

  "I majored in Olde Icelandic legends." Natoli grinned.

  "Super," said Rachel. She cleared a pile of paper from the keyboard in front of her and brought up the Fleetnet search window.

  "What we're doing," she explained, "is looking at things that are supposed to happen during the next few weeks in all the theaters of this war. We'll start with the Web cache first, because it's much quicker and we have a lot of full-text stuff stored anyway-"

  "Like war histories and so on?" asked Natoli.

  "Yeah, occupational hazard. When we've exhausted that, we'll get into the hard copy." She indicated a pile of cardboard boxes pushed into the far corner of the office. They were packed tightly with books. "But the net's keeping us busy for now. You get ten thousand people, they're going to build up a lot of data over time."

  "You know any of the guys in the physics group?" asked Duffy. "Maybe we could speak to them to pad out our story."

  Lieutenant Nguyen nodded. "A friend of mine got seconded to that. They got no hope. The basics are easy. The simultaneous existence of all possible times has been accepted, at least theoretically, since Einstein. And quantum foam engineering is mundane enough to have been written up in Popular Science. Even I've read some stuff about it."

  "I wrote a weekend feature about it once," said Duffy. "But I thought all the lab work was really unsophisticated, a bit like nanotech during the eighties. I wouldn't have thought we had enough quantum muscle to push a cold fucking taco back through eight decades, let alone a carrier battle group."

  "Guess you were wrong," said Natoli.

  "That'll be another correction for the Times then," Duffy joked.

  "But you don't think we can find or rebuild whatever sent us here?" Natoli asked. Her voice said she was searching for a glimmer of hope.

  "Not a chance. Not for fifty, sixty years at best," said Nguyen.

  "You know what this means, don't you?" said Duffy. "We're living in the dark ages, ladies. They haven't even heard of feminism here, let alone the female orgasm."

  "You don't think we'll ever get back?" asked Natoli.

  "I'd like to hope so," said Rachel. "My parents, they really worry about me."

  "So you joined the navy to put their fears at ease?" Duffy asked.

  "I like to surf." Rachel shrugged. "I figured if I had to join up, I might as well get some tube time in. I guess I was kind of an idiot."

  "So, what you got for us, Lieutenant?" said Natoli, clapping her hands to draw a line under the maudlin atmosphere.

  Rachel gathered herself together, stood up, and moved over to the whiteboard.

  "Okay. Today is the ninth of June. A Czechoslovakian village by the name of Lidice will be destroyed today in reprisal for the assassination of an SS guy called Heydrich, by a couple of Czech soldiers flown out of Britain. The occupants will be ma
ssacred and thousands of other Czechs will be shipped off to concentration camps over the next few weeks."

  "Jesus," breathed Natoli. "Can't we do anything about it?"

  "Like what? Broadcast a warning on CNN? Fly a bunch of marines in from Germany? It's a different world here."

  "Couldn't we warn off the Nazis?" asked Duffy. "Tell them we know what they're up to?"

  "They'd laugh in our faces," said Nguyen. "Just forget about it. We already told the local guys. They're like, 'Too bad, it's war, get over it.' Nobody really cares about the small stuff."

  "The small stuff!" cried Natoli.

  "That's right. Fifty million people are going to die in this war. They couldn't care less about a little village full of peasants with alphabet soup for names. Too bad, it's war, get over it."

  Rachel turned back to the board.

  "Tomorrow the Pacific Fleet gets reinforced by the carrier USS Wasp and some cruisers and destroyers. It would have made up for some of the losses they suffered to the Japs at Midway. Now it'll make up for their losses to us instead. Also, tomorrow, Field Marshal Rommel of the Afrika Korps is going to break out of the Cauldron in the Battle of Gazala, destroying three hundred and twenty British tanks in a two-day battle. You won't be surprised to know the locals were very keen to get as much detail about that as they could. The Brits have a bunch of guys stationed here for liaison. They've been hammering us for days about it. That's where the others have gone"-she indicated the empty chairs-"they're briefing the Brits about where and when to hit Rommel. Maybe they'll take the advice. Maybe Rommel will just kick their butts anyway. We'll see.

  "At some point, our presence here is going start fundamentally changing the course of events, and this type of research will become moot."

  "That's happened already," said Natoli.

  "Around these parts, for sure. But the ripples haven't spread very far yet. The Japs are probably still trying to figure out what the hell's going on. Unlike Nimitz and Spruance, they don't have us to walk them through it."

  "And I guess they don't have ships like these to make them believe," Duffy ventured.