The Proteus Operation Read online

  Floyd Lamson was almost as tall as Cassidy, with the same kind of lean, loose-limbed build; but he was clean-shaven and darker, and had high cheekbones, thin lips, a tapering face, and narrow eyes, suggestive of a trace of American Indian. Lamson specialized in knives, handguns, ungentlemanly hand-to-hand things, stealth, burglary, lockpicking, safecracking, and other such noble branches of the martial arts. "So where's this singing lady you said we were going to meet?" he asked, looking back at the dance floor. "I thought she was due on by now."

  "Don't get excited, Floyd," Cassidy said, dropping into his chair and ignoring Molly's squeal of protest as he scooped her onto his knee. "Harry's got plans in that direction. He'll deny it if you ask him, but I can tell. Pilots have this uncanny instinct, see. It's the night flying that does it."

  "I was asking the same thing," Pearl said. "I haven't seen her anywhere for a while."

  As the conversation around the table drifted onto something else, Ferracini took his glass and eased himself back in his chair to stretch a little, at the same time allowing his gaze to drift casually over the people nearby. George, the pianist who played for Janet, had appeared on one of the stools at the bar and was sitting hunched over a drink. He seemed tense and nervous about something, and his hand shook visibly as he raised his glass. Lou, the bartender, came over to say something to him, and then moved away with a deadpan expression, seemingly picking up strong don't-bother-me signals on his bartender's radar. Something was wrong.

  Ferracini sipped his drink for a few seconds. Then he put down the glass, murmured an excuse, and went to the bar. He stopped by George, without looking at him directly. "What's happening?" he asked in a voice low enough not to carry.

  George took another quick gulp of his drink but didn't look up. "Nothing that concerns you, Harry. It's just. . . problems with the place. Don't worry about it." George was scared.

  "What kind of problems?" Ferracini asked. Then suddenly he was alarmed. "How come you're not down there playing yet? Where's Janet?"

  George waved a hand vaguely at the passageway leading into the club from the front stairs. "There's some kind of trouble back there, I'm not sure what. . . . Max's office . . ."

  Ferracini turned and looked in the direction George had indicated. One of the inner double-doors to the club was open. In the passage beyond, a group of people were collecting coats at the hatcheck desk, and more were coming down from the street. "What kind of troub—" Ferracini began, and then broke off as three men came out of the door to Max's office. Two of them were visible just fleetingly before they mingled with the other figures and disappeared up the stairs to the street, but that was all Ferracini needed to recognize Fat-lips and Gum-chewing Goon. "Okay, George, I think I know," he muttered softly, and drew away.

  "There's nothing you can do about it," George called after him as Ferracini started walking toward the doors.

  "We'll see," Ferracini threw back darkly.

  Max's office was a mess when Ferracini let himself in seconds later. The ornamental wall clock, the flower vases, a typewriter, and a couple of pictures were lying smashed on the floor. Some of the furniture had been broken. Drawers had been pulled out and emptied, and papers were scattered everywhere. Max was leaning against the desk, sniffing and dabbing a blood-soaked handkerchief to his nose and mouth. An eye was swelling already, and his clothes were disarrayed. Before Ferracini could say anything, Martha, the plump, middle-aged woman who did the bookkeeping, peered out from the bathroom at the rear of the office, where water was running. She looked white and shaken.

  Then Janet's voice said, "Thanks, Martha, I'll be okay. Who's that out there?"

  Ferracini strode grimly across the room and moved Martha aside to find Janet stooped over the washbasin. Her hair was ruffled, and she was holding a wet facecloth to a bruise on her cheek. She saw Ferracini in the mirror and tried to grin. "Hi. Now you've seen me at my worst." White with rage and unable to speak, Ferracini could only reach out and put a hand on her shoulder.

  "Some guys were here—" Martha began.

  "I saw em."

  "They messed up the place and started slapping Janet about a bit to put the pressure on Max," Martha said. "Max tried to go for the ape in the fancy clothes, and . . ."

  Ferracini squeezed Janet's shoulder and went back into the office. "You okay?" he asked Max.

  Max nodded painfully. "I will be. Get me a drink, willya, Martha—a stiff one."

  The door opened and George came in; he stopped and gaped around him in dismay. "Oh, my God, I never realized . . . I thought they were just talking. I wouldn't have just sat there if I'd known, Harry, honest. . . . I thought—"

  "It's okay," Ferracini said tightly.

  Then Cassidy slipped in, closing the door noiselessly behind, and took in the scene with a glance. "Watched the way you left—figured you might need a backup," he told Ferracini.

  "Do you know who these bums are?" Ferracini asked Max. "Where they hang out, things like that?"

  "Johnny does, but he ain't here yet," Max answered. "That was why they came early. They're the ones we've been getting a hard time from for a while now."

  Cassidy looked at Ferracini. Suddenly he became apprehensive. He'd seen that expression on Ferracini's face before. "Hey, now, just wait a minute, Harry," he cautioned, holding up a hand. "Don't get carried away by any wild ideas, now. . . ."

  An hour later they were back in Max's office, which was looking a bit tidier. Johnny "Six Jays" had arrived, talked for a while, and gone back out to the bar to collect a pal of his, who he said would be better able to answer some of Ferracini's questions. Max was in the bathroom at the back, leaving Ferracini and Cassidy on their own for the moment.

  "This is crazy, Harry," Cassidy hissed, keeping his voice down to an urgent whisper. "Isn't it you who's always telling me this is an A-plus priority mission that we're on, that nothing, but nothing, is allowed to jeopardize? I know it's bugging you and all that, but we can't go after those bums. You're outta your cotton-pickin' mind, man!"

  "Are you in or out?" Ferracini asked him stonily. His face was determined. Cassidy sighed hopelessly; Harry was serious all right.

  Before either of them could say more, Max, patched and bandaged, came out of the bathroom, and a moment later Johnny Six Jays and another man entered from the passageway. Floyd Lamson was with them, too, looking curious. Johnny sat down on a corner of the desk near Ferracini and looked at him dubiously. "I don't think you understand what you're talking about taking on, Harry," he said. "Iceman Bruno stays holed up most of the time at this place he's got out at Pelham—big place, with at least a couple of his gorillas there all the time. It's practically a fortress. You wouldn't even be able to get inside."

  "Oh, really?" Ferracini sounded unconvinced. "Tell me about it, Johnny," he invited.

  Back at Gatehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront, the lights were burning through the night, as usual. Major Warren, Captain Payne, and Sergeant Paddy Ryan were in the back area, installing cable runs on the machine. In the front office, Anna Kharkiovitch was showing Mortimer Greene a summary of the study she had been conducting for the past few weeks, comparing everyday events as reported in the news with the corresponding items contained in the records from their own times. She had uncovered a whole list of further discrepancies.

  "I can't find any differences before the date of our arrival here in January," she said. "But from then on, these things keep appearing—small things, admittedly, but how can they be explained?" She paused to invite comment, but Greene just continued staring with a distant expression at the papers she had spread open on the desk. Anna gestured again at the sheet that she was holding. "Here's another. Item: The Joe Louis versus John Henry fight at the beginning of February. According to our microfilms, Henry was knocked out in the second round for a full count. But at Madison Square Garden a couple of months ago, the fight was stopped at the count of five in the first. Item: Pope Pius XI died in February—except it happened a day earlier in our records
than was reported here. Here are samples of the same day's issues of the same newspaper—they're not the same." Anna tossed the paper down on top of the others. "I could go on, but you can see the kind of thing. This sounds insane, I know, but it's almost as if we're, well . . . somehow in a different world. . . . But how could that be?"

  Greene stared down at the desk for a long time without saying anything. "It's strange, I agree. . . ." he said at last. Then he sat up suddenly and became more brisk. "Nevertheless, we mustn't allow worrying about it to hinder our work. I'd like some time to go through what you've done here. In the meantime, why don't you go back and carry on with the others. I'll join you shortly."

  After Anna had gone, Greene sat for a while turning over the pages of her notes. Then he picked up the phone and gave the number of the Hyde Park Hotel in London, where the time would be early morning. The operator advised that there would be an hour's delay on transatlantic calls. Greene placed the call and then went back to help with the work at hand.

  An hour and a half later, he was back in the office, talking to a sleepy-sounding Winslade. "I'm keeping up morale here and not letting anyone become alarmed," he said, "but the truth of it is, I think we might be in trouble, Claud—real trouble."

  CHAPTER 11

  AT THE TIME OF the Munich crisis, Churchill had said there could be no European security without an Eastern front, and there could be no Eastern front without Russia. But the Russian approaches to the West for a united stand against Nazism had been rejected; furthermore, despite the treaty that obliged them to aid Czechoslovakia in the event that France did so first, the Russians had not been included in the Munich conference at which the Czechs' fate was settled. But then, who would invite a potential victim into the room where the alibis were being hatched?

  As the summer of 1939 approached, two opposing currents were influencing Anglo-French policy-making. Pulling one way were the traditionalist forces who held the view that a Nazi-Communist collision might not be such a bad thing; that if the two systems ended up destroying each other, then probably so much the better. This school was prepared to accept a token Polish commitment, but on no account to be drawn into any pact with the Soviets that would mean continued entanglement in the conflict after Poland collapsed. Pushing the other way was the increasing pressure of Churchill and his followers, motivated from behind the scenes by Winslade's group, who knew where Hitler was leading the world, and who were happier at the thought of leaving the West's differences with the Soviets to be resolved some other time.

  The resulting British actions were ambiguous. Thus, only a day after his defiant words of March 17, Prime Minister Chamberlain had rejected as "premature" an approach by the Soviet Foreign Minister, Litvinov, for a conference to discuss an anti-Nazi front, just as had happened "before" in the Proteus world. In April, Litvinov renewed his attempt with a formal proposal to the British ambassador in Moscow, just as before; the British government turned it down, just as before; and in May, Stalin replaced Litvinov with Molotov, just as before. Litvinov had been Russia's strongest advocate of collective security with the West, and the Proteus people had hoped to bring about changes in British policy sufficient to prevent his departure. On this issue, therefore, Winslade and Churchill were compelled to concede failure.

  On the other hand, Britain suddenly announced that it was calling up its reserves to bring the Army, Navy, and Air Force up to war strength. That was something which had not happened "before".

  "The problem, you see, is that Chamberlain is trying to pursue two irreconcilable goals," Kurt Scholder told Professor Lindemann across the compartment of the coach. Their train was just entering the outskirts of Chelmsford, in Essex. They were returning to London from the Air Ministry Research Establishment at Bawdsey Manor near Felixstowe, where Scholder, under a suitably contrived alias, had met Watson-Watt, Henry Tizard, and other government scientists to offer some thoughts on radar, aircraft interception, fighter ground-control systems, and related topics. "He's woken up to the immediate menace, yes, but he still can't bring himself to accept Russia as a major force in European affairs. He wants to curb Hitler with all these guarantees, but at the same time keep Russia out. It can't be done."

  "Well, at least the country is starting to show some teeth," Lindemann said. "Some of that influence might get as far as Moscow and affect the talks there for the better." He didn't sound very hopeful.

  "Maybe." Neither did Scholder.

  One of the first things Molotov had done upon taking up his new appointment was make overtures for improving relationships with Germany. To avoid being left out in the cold, Chamberlain had responded belatedly by instructing his own representative in Moscow to open talks with the Russians, too. But in the Proteus team's world, these talks had been halfhearted and had served only to reinforce Stalin's suspicions that he was being maneuvered toward a war that the West planned to wriggle out of. So Stalin had stood back later, in August, when Hitler stormed into Poland and the Allies declared war in the expectation of being free of it within a month or two; he had looked on impassively when the tiger they had ridden about-faced and ate them. His own turn had come later.

  "What a strange existence you've led, Kurt," Lindemann said. He had a reputation among his contemporaries for being somewhat abrupt and showing limited patience for ideas that differed from his own; however, understandably, he tended to be more accommodating where visitors from the future were concerned. "Twice now, you've been through this extraordinary process, and each time you've ended up further back in time than when you started. You must be beginning to feel like a—oh, I don't know—some kind of chronological Wandering Jew."

  Scholder smiled. "But at least this time I have a feeling of having changed for the better. I saw enough of the nihilism of Hitler's Reich in the last world I was in—and then Heydrich's, which was even worse."

  "That sounds hardly possible."

  "Oh, yes. The state came to extend its power and presence totally into every facet of the individual's life. Everything you did, everywhere you went, everyone you met or talked to—all was supervised, scrutinized, regulated. Every activity had to be reported—even a stamp-collecting club or a children's sports team." Scholder tossed up his hands. "The children! They were practically taken away, brutalized and indoctrinated, even in preschool years. Because Nazi superstitions concerning race and heredity were law, the weak and the mentally feeble were sterilized and taught simple tasks, if they were of any potential use at all."

  "And if not?"

  "They were eliminated from the race by a program of compulsory euthanasia."

  Lindemann stared, horrified. "Surely not," he protested. "How could something like that be enforced? I mean, what if the parents refused?"

  Scholder smiled humorlessly. "They didn't refuse. You can't imagine what it was like. The family had ceased to exist. Individuals had no rights or liberties. They existed simply to serve the state. The state owned everybody." He gestured at the picturesque townscape outside the window, which vanished suddenly as the train drew into Chelmsford station. "This is a different world. Professor—civilized and free. It has hope yet for a future. Quaint and old-fashioned, certainly, but in the ways that matter, it's more like the place that I came from originally."

  "That world must seem an eternity away by now," Lindemann remarked. "You were how old when you left there in 2025—thirty-five, you said?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you have any, any . . ."

  "Family there? Yes. I no longer think about them. There's no point."

  "Oh . . . I'm sorry."

  "I was a physicist working on the development of fusion propulsion systems for interplanetary spacecraft," Scholder said, seeing Lindemann's awkwardness and moving the conversation along. "The new breakthroughs in physics were relevant to my work as well as fascinating in their own right, and I began specializing in them." He shrugged. "Overlord's agents introduced themselves and made a proposition that it was impossible to refuse, financially, and
the next thing I knew I was working in Brazil."

  "And from there you went back to the Nazi Germany that had been created in 1941."

  "Yes."

  "Working on the bomb program for Hitler's assault on Russia the following year."

  "That is so."

  "Were the bombs manufactured there in Germany?"

  "Not manufactured. They were assembled from prefabricated parts shipped through from the future. Overlord didn't want to equip Hitler with a full-fledged industry of his own. I suppose they didn't want him to forget who was in charge."

  Lindemann wrinkled his nose and rubbed it hesitantly with a knuckle. "Weren't there any, ah . . . any moral problems—with conscience or anything—I mean, working on something like that?"

  "While we were in Brazil, we didn't know what the nuclear explosives were being sent through for," Scholder said. "We were told they were for routine engineering work—demolitions, excavations, that kind of thing. That wouldn't have been unusual."

  "But when you actually went back there?

  "Well, then the working conditions were suddenly very different. We had no choice. They preferred using people with relatives back in 2025 because of the pressure it was possible to exert."

  "Oh, how dreadful!"

  "Most of the Nazis' methods were originated by Overlord. They really weren't very inventive themselves. The attempted putsch in 1923 was about their limit—hardly memorable for its brilliance or originality."

  The train had stopped, and, for a few seconds, Lindemann watched the activity on the platform. "So how did you come to get stuck there?" he asked at last. "Was that something else that you had no choice about?"

  "I'm not really sure what happened," Scholder replied. "You see, several years later, the Nazi return-gate back to 2025 was destroyed. A number of us who had come from that time were trapped in Germany as a consequence. We never did find out what happened. Our best guess was that after the Soviet Union was disposed of, the Nazis decided they no longer needed further help from Overlord. They had become an unstoppable force in their own world and saw a clear road to complete domination. Afterward, I was drafted into other things."