The Proteus Operation Read online

  Bannering glanced at his watch after they had been talking for some time. "They should be here soon now," he said.

  "Yes, Churchill was known for being punctual, wasn't he." Winslade drew on the cigar that he had helped himself to and exhaled luxuriously. Although he looked superficially relaxed, a glint of excitement showed in his eyes.

  "You've been looking forward to meeting him," Bannering commented as he watched.

  "He had none of the virtues I dislike, and all of the vices I admire," Winslade admitted. He puffed at his cigar again and thought to himself for a moment. "Not only that—the feeling of being back here is exhilarating, too. You know, the problem with America, Arthur, is that it went directly from barbarism to decadence, without the customary period of intervening civilization."

  "Humph—you stole that from Churchill," Bannering accused. "I read it somewhere in one of his papers."

  "Did I? Oh, maybe I did. Is it legally possible to plagiarize between one world and another? I wonder."

  Kurt Scholder studied his drink and swirled it around in the glass first one way, then the other. "With Germany, the problem is a different one," he murmured. "There, you see, they went from civilization to barbarism without giving themselves a chance to enjoy any decadence at all."

  A tap sounded on the door, and the maître d'hôtel appeared. "The rest of your party is here, Mr. Winslade," he announced. "Mr. Winston Churchill and three other gentlemen."

  "Ah, yes, splendid," Winslade acknowledged, rising to his feet. "Show them straight in if you would, please."

  The maître d'hôtel held the door aside and ushered in a broad, stocky figure with thinning, red hair and a pugnacious jaw, dressed in a striped three-piece suit with polka-dot bow tie; he was already familiar from the hours that the Proteus people had spent poring over photographs and documents. Behind him was Eden, tall, handsomely endowed with dark, wavy hair and a thick mustache, also wearing a three-piece suit. Beside Eden came Duff Cooper, shorter in stature and recognizable by his high hairline, straight mouth, and frank, open face with calm, thoughtful eyes. Finally, bringing up the rear, was another tall figure with a dark mustache, looking stiffer and more archaically attired than Eden, frowning suspiciously from side to side as the party entered. The corners of Bannering's mouth twitched upward, and he gave Scholder a quick, satisfied nod. The technical expert was Lindemann.

  Bannering and Scholder set down their glasses, rose, and moved forward on either side of Winslade to greet their guests.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE WAITERS FINISHED CLEARING away the dishes and departed, leaving a hot plate with two fresh pots of coffee on a side-table. Winslade excused the bartender and accompanied him to the door, turning the key in the lock after the bartender had left. Then, instead of returning to his chair, Winslade clasped his hands behind his back and began pacing slowly by the windows along one side of the room.

  The talk over lunch had been primarily social, to establish a conversational familiarity between the two groups. Despite their puzzlement and curiosity, the guests had refrained from pressing questions in the presence of the hotel staff; now, however, the time had arrived for more serious business. Churchill lit a cigar and sat back in his chair to follow Winslade curiously with his eyes. The room became very quiet.

  "Mr. Churchill," Winslade began without looking around as he continued pacing, "I understand that among other things, you enjoy reading the works of H.G. Wells."

  "That's true," Churchill agreed. He stared moodily at his brandy glass and snorted. "I have to admit that for the last few years I've had ample time for more leisurely pursuits. Yes, Mr. Winslade, I enjoy Wells's speculations and prophecies. The ability to foretell the future is an art much admired and, with mixed results, attempted by politicians also. The politician, however, must also be able to explain afterwards why his predictions didn't come true. But why, pray, do you raise the subject?"

  Winslade replied obliquely. "How about his novel The Time Machine? Have you managed to include that in your readings? If so, what did you think of it? Was the premise plausible, do you imagine, or too farfetched to take seriously?"

  Churchill sipped slowly from his glass and frowned. Lindemann stiffened visibly in his seat, his mouth clamped tight, while Eden and Duff Cooper exchanged wondering looks. It was clear in that brief instant that such a possibility had already occurred to them. That was as Winslade had intended. He had allowed several days for the notion to sink in and for its impact to dissipate before the meeting. Doing it that way minimized the risk of having to waste half the afternoon convincing an audience too overcome by incredulity to be receptive.

  Winslade wheeled around to face the table and brought his hands up to rest on the back of an empty chair. "I trust we have already satisfied you that we are genuine, and that in any case we're not the kind of people who would attempt a foolish hoax," he said. His expression was earnest. The jovial manner that he had maintained through lunch had gone. "To avoid taxing your patience further, gentlemen—yes, we have come here from a future age. To be precise, we have traveled back from the United States of the year 1975."

  Stupefied looks greeted his words. He went on, "By that year the world of the Western democracies has been reduced to North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The totalitarian systems that you see rising today have subjugated the whole of Europe, Asia, and Africa, in over thirty years of ferociousness and brutality aimed at world domination. The South American states are already committed to similar ideologies. What is left of the West faces a final conflict that will be waged by weapons of destructive power that few people in 1939 are capable of imagining. The odds against the West are overwhelming. It cannot hope to survive. All it can prepare for is a noble end." Winslade paused to run his eyes around the table. His voice fell to little more than a whisper. "But that is what we have come back to change, if we can."

  There was a long silence. Bannering and Scholder waited impassively, while the guests at last faced squarely and grappled with the implications of the truth that they had been putting off in their minds to this moment.

  Finally, Lindemann shook his head. "I don't know. I really don't know." He glanced from side to side for support from his companions. "Look, I can't fault any of the evidence that you people have produced, and goodness knows I've spent time on little else since Winston showed it to me . . . but I don't have to tell you how preposterous the whole thing sounds. He tossed up his hands in exasperation. "What happens to causality and common sense if what you've said is true? How can you have come from a future that you now say you hope to change?"

  Eden was recovering slowly from the trance that had gripped him. "It can't make sense, can it?" he said distantly. "Supposing that you did manage to change the whole situation in—when was it?—1975 . . . then the future that you came from wouldn't exist anymore, would it?"

  "So where would you have come from at all?" Duff Cooper completed, taking the point and sounding equally mystified.

  Winslade seemed to have been expecting the question and answered evenly, "We can't give you a complete explanation, I'm afraid. The machine employed was built in circumstances of extreme haste and urgency. There wasn't time for an exhaustive theoretical treatment of the subject.

  Lindemann shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "This machine," he said. "What physical principles did its operation depend on? Was it a vehicle of some description, or what?"

  The conversation over lunch had already identified Scholder as the scientist. Winslade nodded for him to take it from there, then turned away to stand staring out of one of the windows at the treetops of Hyde Park. Scholder cleared his throat, clasped his hands together on the table in front of him, and began, "The quantum-mechanical wave function is merely a spatio-temporal subset of a more complex entity that exists in a state of continuous transition between additional high-order modes. The collapse of the wave function represents merely the localization of an event in our particular subdomain of this super-realm."

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p; Churchill caught Eden's eye and gave a baffled shrug, but continued puffing at his cigar without saying anything. Lindemann saw the movement and interjected, "You remember the talks we've had on the modern interpretation of atomic particles, Winston. The wave function is a mathematical description of where, with varying probability in space and time, a particle might be observed when an experiment is set up to detect it. When the experiment is actually performed and a definite result obtained, the wave function is said to 'collapse' to one of its possible solutions. Until that happens, the position and motion of the particle are indeterminate."

  Churchill nodded, but his perplexed expression remained. "So what's this 'more complex entity' that Kurt's talking about now?" he asked.

  "Well, it sounds as if the wave function described by our laws of physics—what exists in the familiar universe of space and time that we perceive—is just a part of something bigger . . . a 'hyper-wave' function that exists in a state of continuous oscillation between our and other higher-order modes—'dimensions' I suppose you might call them. But this hyper-wave function can become localized in a form that manifests itself as a mass-energy quantum—a particle—in our subdomain, as it were, of the whole. Apparently, that's what we mean when we say that the wave function collapses."

  Scholder nodded. "And it turns out that it's possible to induce relocalization into other subdomains—in other words, physical projection into them. Furthermore, some such projections involve coordinate shifts along the axes of what we perceive as space and time. Hence we have the basis not only for traveling through time, but for covering immense spatial distances as well."

  "So . . . let me see. You're saying what?" Lindemann said. Only the sound of Winslade whistling tunelessly through his teeth while he stared out the window broke the silence. "But all that says," Lindemann objected at last, "is that basic particles are material condensations of vibrating patterns that extend into other 'places,' and that those condensations can be 'evaporated' and recondensed elsewhere. It doesn't say anything about sending a macroscopic object from one such place to another. How do you achieve that?"

  "Sometimes many quantum events can be made to correlate in such a way that they add up to significant effects at the macroscopic level," Scholder replied. "The track of condensations in a cloud chamber, all caused by the passage of a single particle, is one example. The correlated relaxations of many excited atoms to produce coherent light from a laser is another."

  "Laser?"

  "Oh, I was forgetting. Something I'll explain another time. Let's just say for now that the pattern of bound wave functions that defines a macroscopic object can be relocalized simultaneously. In other words, the entire object can be transferred coherently to a different subdomain."

  They continued for a while longer, and Scholder finished with an outline of the equipment involved. As Lindemann's questions became more specific, Scholder seemed to become evasive. Finally Lindemann said, "Without wishing to be offensive, Dr. Scholder, I must say that surprisingly little seems to have been known about the underlying physics. In fact, I'm tempted to express amazement that this machine ever came to be built at all. I do take it you were one of the designers?"

  Scholder spread his hands and shook his head. "I'm sorry if I gave that impression. No, I was just one of the—how would you say?—the mechanics, as it were, who worked on the project. A little of the theory rubbed off."

  "A quantum mechanic?" Churchill threw in, and guffawed to himself.

  "Strange," Lindemann murmured. "I'd have thought that whoever was responsible for the enterprise would have sent along somebody who was conversant with the theory. And this other group setting up the return connection in New York—there isn't a theoretician among them, either?"

  "There couldn't be," Scholder replied. "There was nobody like that available in 1975 who could have been sent. You see, the machine wasn't designed then. It wasn't even designed in our world. It was designed in another age entirely, following certain discoveries that didn't take place until the first quarter of the twenty-first century."

  Lindemann was looking bewildered. "I don't understand," he said. "How could it have been built in 1975 if it wasn't designed until the 2000s? This is getting ridiculous."

  "Because the machine that we built in 1975 wasn't the first one," Scholder answered. "The first one was built in 2025, and it connected back to a return-gate constructed in Germany in 1926. And that return-gate, gentlemen, is still operating there, over in Germany, at this very moment!"

  Winslade wheeled round from the window. "That was how, in spite of the apparent paradoxes which you have so correctly drawn attention to, we have reason to believe that the past can indeed be reengineered," he said. "You see, it seems that it has been done before. That was how the world that exists outside these windows, with all its problems and dangers that you know of all too well, came to be that way. It was interfered with and changed from something else that existed previously."

  A strained silence descended. Eden covered the upper half of his face with a hand, shook his head slowly from side to side, and moaned quietly, "Oh, God."

  Churchill thrust his lower lip out pugnaciously and stared long and hard, first at Winslade, then at Scholder. Finally he said in a slow, measured voice, "If your intention has been to thoroughly confuse and bemuse all of us for the purpose of making sure that we stay here until we have listened to all you have to say, then I must congratulate you on what I have no doubt is already a resounding success. That being so, I trust that you will now attempt to dispel some of the confusion. Might I suggest that you begin at the beginning, wherever that may be in this bewildering chronological imbroglio, and proceed from there in whatever comes nearest to logical order? I think that would be appreciated by all of us."

  Winslade nodded as if he had been expecting it. "Kurt here is actually from the twenty-first century," he said. "Let's begin with that. Lindemann slumped numbly back in his chair. Eden was still sitting with a hand half covering his face. Winslade smiled. "But first, a refill of our glasses, gentlemen. Allow me."

  Winslade moved over to the bar and poured fresh drinks, which were passed around the table. Duff Cooper, whose wide brow had been contorting in knots as he tried to make sense of what had been said, leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table and interlaced his fingers. He composed a businesslike manner and said briskly, "Yes, let's start at the beginning. Now, Dr. Scholder, where and when were you born?"

  "In the city of Dortmund, Germany, on July 15, 1990," Scholder replied promptly.

  "And you are how old?"

  "This year I shall have been alive for sixty-nine years."

  "Having come back from the year 2025?"

  "Yes."

  Duff Cooper thought for a moment. "But 1990 to 2025 is only thirty-five years."

  "I didn't go back directly to 1975. I went back to 1941, and then, thirty-four years later when it was 1975, went through the process again to arrive here. Thirty-five plus thirty-four is sixty-nine."

  "Oh." Duff Cooper's composure evaporated. He sat back, shaking his head, and looked helplessly from one to another of his companions.

  Scholder couldn't contain a thin smile. "Perhaps it would be best if I began by saying a few words about the world that I am originally from," he suggested. The others waited in silence. He went on, "Its history was identical to this worlds up until the mid-1920s. The Great War ended with the Armistice of 1918 and the subsequent Treaty of Versailles. Germany was reconstituted as a liberal democratic state under the Weimar constitution. The Locarno Pact was concluded in 1925, by which Britain and Italy guaranteed the Franco-German frontier against aggression by either side, and in 1926, Germany joined the League of Nations."

  Eden sat up again and listened while Scholder reeled off the events. "But after that it was different? You mean something happened to send everything off in a different direction somehow?"

  "Let's not get our perspectives confused." Arthur Bannering cautioned. He had been talkative
during lunch, especially with Eden on topics of foreign affairs, but the technical conversation since then had left him with nothing to contribute. "What Kurt is describing is the way things were 'originally.' If anything was sent off in a different direction, it was the world that we're in now—this one."

  "Umm, yes . . ." Eden said. "Of course. I wasn't thinking about it that way."

  Scholder resumed, "Europe continued to recover through the later twenties. Although the crash of the U.S. stocks and securities market in 1929 did trigger a worldwide economic recession, the situation was brought under control before the damage had gone too far."

  "Interesting," Eden said. "You mean there wasn't the same world slump that we've just been through? How was it avoided?"

  "It wasn't as bad, anyway," Bannering said. "The German Chancellor in 1930 was Heinrich Bruening, leader of the Catholic Center Party. He joined forces with the industrialist, Hugenberg, of the Nationalists, and—"

  "No, I was there that year,' Lindemann interjected. "You mean Hitler allied with Hugenberg, yes?"

  Scholder shook his head and stared at Lindemann pointedly. "Oh, no, Professor. In the world that I am originally from, Hitler was never more than an obscure figure on the lunatic fringe of German politics. He wasn't involved in anything that mattered."

  Lindemann started to say something more, but Churchill raised a hand. "Let them finish, Prof," he murmured.

  Bannering went on, "The Bruening-Hugenberg coalition introduced a series of bold financial policies which led to a cooperative European program for economic recovery. Basically, their program involved extensive aid to the underprivileged, heavy reinvestment in new technologies, and a revitalizing of overseas trade, especially with Asia and the Far East. Japan later became a major partner, too, under the Inukai government."