Weaver

by Stephen Baxter

  But she did not believe, Ben thought, lying there, eyes closed. She spouted this dreary hotchpotch rubbish merely to control the fool Trojan, for she, English-born, needed a German puppet to exert full influence within the SS. In Ben’s opinion all Nazis were either fools or in the thrall of fools. But could none of them see what a menace this woman was?

  Their voices murmured, meaningless, falling away. He listened, his eyes closed. He longed to be anywhere but this place. He longed even to be back in the solitary-confinement cell in which he had been kept for month after month, while Fiveash and Trojan rebuilt their devilish machinery, until they were ready to bring him back to this hell of drugs and artificial sleep. He longed even to escape into sleep, and yet he dreaded it for the damage his dreams might do.

  Trojan was talking again, boasting to his brother. ‘The new calculating equipment is remarkable, isn’t it? Much of it is British, frankly; this is one technological area where they seem to be ahead of us. They are building powerful electronic machines, clearly intended for some such purpose as code-breaking, or command and control. We have raided a country house called Bletchley Park, for example, where they call their machine the Colossus“. And the British Post Office has a research establishment at a place called Dollis Hill north-west of London. Such gadgets as this are manufactured there.’

  ‘The Post Office?’

  ‘They are used to handling this kind of equipment in their telephone exchanges. Look here, Ernst - see the valves, the glass tubes? We have over two thousand in this machine alone, each capable of switching from one state to another in just a millionth of a second. It is this speed of switching, you see, which enables the machine to carry through its computations so rapidly.’

  ‘And how do you express your problems to it?’

  ‘Ah, good question. You speak“ to this beast in a physical language. It is a question of setting switches and plugging in cables, as if reordering its very brain. These are the most advanced thinking machines in the world! And with such devices the computation of Gödel trajectories becomes trivial.’

  ‘Trivial.“ You mean that in the academic sense, don’t you? Not an intellectual challenge.” But perhaps one should apply the word to your whole enterprise, Josef.’

  Fiveash laughed. ‘Your muddy foot-soldier of a brother has a brain in there, Josef.’

  ‘Unterscharfuhrer Fiveash, yes, I am a muddy infantryman, and proud of it. That is the reality of the war to me. Mud and guns and blood, hunger and death. All this talk of ancient powers and time travel is so much claptrap. You already failed once - that nonsense over Hastings!’

  ‘But we will not fail again.’ And can you not see,’ said Josef Trojan earnestly, ‘that if we succeed we will transform the fortunes of the war at a stroke? For we will cut down our most powerful opponent—’

  ‘America.’

  ‘Yes. Cut it down at the root! Let the Americans shuffle their tanks and ships around the world; it will avail them nothing. We have a plan, you see, a new plan to do with Christopher Columbus, and the beginning of it all. Believe it or not, our historical research is taking longer than the technical. But we are making progress. And then we will see how it goes for the Reich, in a new and transformed world in which America does not exist at all.’

  And nor would the Reich exist, Ben thought. You unimaginative fool.

  The voices fell silent. Perhaps he had spoken aloud.

  He opened his eyes. The lamps’ glare dazzled him, and he blinked away tears. He could see the three of them standing just outside the glass wall of his chamber, two black SS uniforms, a uniform of the Wehrmacht. Ben tried to see the brother’s face, Ernst’s. He imagined himself as Ernst must see him. His skinny frame lying above the smoothed-out sheets. The shackles that bound his wrists and ankles and neck. The tubes that snaked under his striped prison-issue pyjamas and into veins in his arms and legs, into his penis and into his mouth. The metal cap that had been fixed to his scalp, attached with screws that had been tapped into the very bone of his skull.

  Josef Trojan’s face loomed like a moon. ‘Good morning, little fellow. Or is it good afternoon? You never know, do you? Don’t you have anything to say, Ernst? Remarkable sight, isn’t he - a triumph for modern medical science. He never leaves his little glass room, save in the imagination, of course. He can’t do anything. He can’t even play with his own circumcised, cathetered cock, poor fellow. All he can do is sleep - and I control even that, for by turning this switch I can administer drugs to him at will, do you see? Sleep, and dream the dreams I command through the loudspeakers that surround his pillow. And as he sleeps he guides the teasings of the Loom of history, and by doing so he wins the war for Hitler. What do you think, Ernst? Even you must be impressed.’

  ‘What I see here is cruelty. Arbitrary, pointless cruelty. Such ambition and vanity will bring us down in the end, Josef.’

  ‘If you believe that you really are a fool.’

  But Ben heard uncertainty in his voice. As the months had turned into years, others had expressed similar doubts over Trojan’s elaborate project and the resources it was consuming. It was a long time indeed since Himmler had shown any support, let alone visited Richborough. Trojan had even once been hauled in by the Gestapo for an interrogation. The experience had left him shaken and unsure. But Julia Fiveash was always on hand to stiffen his spine.

  ‘Enough,’ Trojan said. ‘Let’s put him back to work.’ He turned his switch. Ben felt the opiates course into his blood. The brothers and Fiveash walked on around the facility. ‘You should come work with me here at Richborough, you know, Ernst,’ Trojan said. ‘There are Wehrmacht guards here. I’m sure I could fix a transfer.’

  ‘My duty lies elsewhere.’

  ‘Your trouble is you never got over that wretched French girl, did you? It’s muddled your thinking. You always were a fool ...’

  The world spun away, as if he were tumbling down a well, and Ben, trapped inside himself, fell into fragmented dreams.

  III

  18 June

  Mary’s train into York was late.

  When she got to the little tea shop on Low Petergate they were waiting for her, sitting at a window table, drinking tea and eating cake: Tom Mackie, slightly crumpled and donnish as always despite his Navy uniform, and Gary, his own British Army uniform fitting him closely. Both men got up when Mary squeezed her way to the table, hot, flustered, tired. ‘Mom—’ Gary embraced her. He smelled of cigarette smoke, earth, a whiff of cordite, a soldier’s smell. But the arms around her were strong. It made her ache that she would only have a few minutes with him.

  Mackie pulled out a chair. ‘Good to see you, Mary. Tea, is it, a scone or two? You might have to wait a bit, I’m afraid; all these GIs are rushing the girl off her feet.’ He turned and raised his arm, trying to catch the waitress’s eye.

  ‘Thank you. Sorry I’m late.’ She sat, setting her handbag and gas-mask pouch on the floor beside her.

  The shop was crowded with servicemen, talking loudly, smoking, most of them apparently American. And music played, a sentimental Glenn Miller ballad. It was probably the Promi; you heard it played everywhere for the music, which everybody agreed was a better selection than the BBC’s. She was right in the big picture window; it was a surprise such a window had survived the bombing. Looking along a street crowded with military vehicles and black government saloon cars, she could just make out the angular ruins of the minster.

  ‘You look a bit hot and bothered,’ Gary said.

  ‘The train’s a trial at the moment, isn’t it? Packed with servicemen, en route from A to B.’

  ‘You do get a sense of the mobilisation, don’t you?’ Mackie said. ‘Lots of pieces being moved around the board, ready for the chess game to begin.’

  It was all hush-hush, but it was impossible not to know what was going on. Troops had been pouring into the country for months. In the north and in Scotland farms and villages had been evacuated, vast tracts of land set aside for training. It was
said that the US Eighth Air Force had pretty much taken over East Anglia. At night, across a vast swathe of countryside north of the Winston Line, you could hear the rumble of tanks and mobile weapons, of studebakers and jeeps, trundling to their marshalling points under cover of darkness.

  And here was her own son, preparing to throw himself into the cauldron. He seemed so much less boyish than when she’d last seen him. Now he had a man’s heavy body, a thickening neck, even slightly thinning hair like his father’s. And he was full of nervous energy. He kept glancing at a clock on the wall.

  ‘You’ve filled out,’ she said to him.

  ‘Well, I’d hope so,’ he said patiently. ‘Mom, it’s eighteen months already since I got sprung from that lebensborn camp in Kent. They do give us decent rations, you know.’

  Mackie tamped his pipe tobacco. ‘Better in the US Army, I hear. You could always swap sides.’

  Gary shook his head firmly. ‘I started this thing in these colours, and I’ll finish it in them.’

  ‘From Dunkirk to Berlin, eh?’ Mackie murmured. ‘Good for you.’

  The girl came over and took Mary’s order. No older than sixteen or seventeen, she wore rouge, eye liner, lipstick, and what looked like real stockings. Pushing back through the tables she ran a gauntlet of leers, whistles and wandering hands.

  ‘Remarkable,’ Mackie said, watching her go. ‘Here we are not half a mile from the seat of Halifax’s government, and there’s a girl like that, a walking demonstration of the way the GIs have distorted the British economy, with their ration-busting cigarettes and sweets and silk stockings, all pumping up the black market - their rather coarse glamour—’

  Gary laughed and sipped his tea. ‘You sound as if you’d like to be rid of your allies, Captain. How did Churchill put it? You’d carry on the fight until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old“. Well, here we are.’

  ‘Yes, thanks very much. And the sooner we get you lot packed off back to the land of the free the better.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  ‘Let’s get down to business.’ Mackie said to Mary, ‘We need to talk more fully. But I’ve already given Gary an outline of what we’re up to. And an indication of the role I’d like him to play.’

  Gary eyed her. ‘History books and time machines!’

  Mackie glanced around uneasily. ‘Walls have ears and all that, old chap.’

  ‘Well, all right.’ Gary spoke more quietly. ‘Look, Mom, Captain Mackie got me seconded to his operation, though I have an assurance it won’t be until W plus three.’

  ‘W“?’

  ‘W-Day,’ Mackie said with a cold grin. ‘Operation Walrus. Eats sea lions. One of Churchill’s.’

  Gary said, ‘I’m struggling to believe that I’ll be more use following up this fruitcake stuff than I would be with my buddies kicking Nazi butt around Sussex and Kent.’

  Mary nodded. ‘I understand. I generally have trouble believing it myself. But I do have evidence, Gary.’

  ‘Historical stuff.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I’m here to discuss with the Captain, in fact. I’ve spent three years on this now, on and off. The likelihood of this project of the Germans coming off might seem low. But if it did, the consequences could be - well, catastrophic.’

  Gary frowned. ‘If you weren’t my mother I’d walk out of here right now. You hear too much of this guff about Hitler’s secret super-weapons.’

  Mackie said, ‘I’ve made it plain to Gary that he’s under no obligation to carry this through. Indeed he’s under no obligation to return to front-line combat at all.’

  ‘I don’t want a damn staff job,’ Gary said fiercely. ‘That would kill me off faster than any Nazi bullet.’ Mary flinched, and he was instantly regretful. He covered her fingers with his. ‘Mom, I’m sorry. But you can see how it is. Especially as we’re so close to the off. Or so I heard.’ He drained his tea, and swept up the last of the cakes from the plate and stuffed them in his pocket, an old prisoner’s reflex. ‘Listen, I got to go. I do wish we could have had more time, Mom.’ He leaned over to give her another hug; he let her hold him for a long minute. When they broke he said, ‘I’ll tell you what. If I were going to go back and fix the past to resolve this damn war, I know where I’d go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Versailles. The lousy settlement after the first war. You speak to any German, and I spoke to enough in the stalag, and he’ll tell you that’s where it all began. A just peace and you’d get no Hitler.’

  Mackie murmured, ‘I’ll take it on advisement.’

  ‘You do that.’ Gary stood and took his gas-mask pouch from the back of his chair. ‘Good day, Captain. Mom.’

  ‘Godspeed, son.’

  He walked away. Once outside the shop he fixed his cap on his head, straightened up and marched off. She watched him until he was out of sight.

  Mackie waited patiently. ‘He’s a good young man. I’m sure he’ll fulfil the mission we have for him.’

  ‘I just want him to get through all this without getting shot up again.’

  He tapped his saucer with a clean fingernail. ‘Look, let’s wait for your tea. Then perhaps we should get out of here. I think I’d feel more comfortable if we talked on the hoof, so to speak.’

  Mary sat back. ‘Come on, Tom. You can’t seriously believe there’s a German spy in here. We’re surrounded by GIs!’

  Mackie grunted. ‘Believe you me, there are circles in the British government who are more wary of our allies than our enemies. No offence. Where is that girl?’

  IV

  So they walked, heading through the heart of the city towards the minster.

  It was a hot June day, a little after three. In the centre of the city the shops were busy, the place bustling even on a Friday afternoon, full of military and pinstripe-suited civil service types. A British Restaurant, a self-service café ostensibly for the use of the bombed-out, was doing brisk business. Mackie and Mary, both bookish, paused by a W.H. Smith’s whose window was piled high with Penguin editions of Graham Greene and Agatha Christie novels, and pot-boiler crime and romance.

  It was the GIs who caught the eye, though. You saw them everywhere, hanging around on street corners like unruly kids, endlessly chewing gum, and ostentatiously smoking their Camels and Lucky Strikes at a time when smokers in England mostly had to put up with foul Turkish brands. They had a kind of loose casualness about them that was just this side of slovenly, and it made you realise how prim and proper most British servicemen looked by comparison. In England’s cities and towns, 1943 would always be remembered as the GI summer, Mary thought.

  York was busier than most towns in free England, because it was the emergency seat of government. But it shared with the rest the marks of the long war: the ack-ack gun emplacements, the pillboxes, the sandbags around the public buildings. The major air campaigns had been abandoned after those frenetic months of the invasion in 1940, but because it was the seat of government York had taken more than its share of the sporadic Luftwaffe raids - the Brits called them ‘tip and run’ raids. So there were gaps in the streets, marked by stubs of walls and broken pipes, the rubble cleared away and piled up in vast mounds in the parks. Some of these bomb sites were four years old and were choked with greenery; the weeds loved the brick dust and the ash. Mary supposed glumly that when W-Day came the bombing would resume in Britain, just as it was about to resume, so she’d heard, in the heart of Germany, and that York and other cities would soon have fresh scars to add to the old.

  Some of the changes wrought by the war seemed positively medieval. Every park, playing field and flower bed was given over to growing crops or raising pigs: it must have been five hundred years, Mary mused, since the farmyard had penetrated the city in such a way. And there was a pervasive atmosphere of neglect. The city was stripped of railings and lamp-posts, the metal turned over to the armaments industry. After nearly four years without
a lick of fresh paint the homes and shops and offices looked shabby, slowly decaying, their blacked-out windows like closed eyes. Mary thought she saw a similar round-shouldered shabbiness in the people, in their patched-up clothes and shoes, now enduring the fourth year of a war that had become, worse than grinding, boring.