The Proteus Operation Read online

  "Inukai," Eden repeated. "But he was assassinated, wasn't he? Some right-wing militants were upset about the naval agreement that he signed."

  "In this world," Scholder said softly. "It never happened in the one that I'm describing."

  Bannering allowed a moment for Scholder's point to sink in. Then he continued, "The European-Japanese initiative impressed the Hoover administration sufficiently for the U.S. to revise its own policies, and the outcome was a worldwide commitment to cooperation and growth instead of protectionism and ruinous competition. By the middle of the thirties, prosperity had returned on an even wider basis than before."

  "Hmm . . . concerning the actual details of the economic measures," Eden began, "what—" He caught a scowl from Churchill and raised a hand quickly. "But perhaps we can go into those some other time."

  "Yes, make it some other time, Tony, Churchill grunted. He looked back at Scholder. "And?"

  Scholder shrugged. "The effects quickly spread. An 'Eastern Locarno' was signed in Warsaw in 1935, guaranteeing the borders of the states between Germany and Russia. With the West visibly committed to settling its differences amicably, Russia's xenophobia began to relax, and with the easing of tensions, the right-wing reactionary movements that had begun appearing in the West declined—Mussolini, for example, was deposed in 1937. The Soviet Union grew into a superpower rivaling Europe and America, and the resulting competition compelled the gradual dismantling of the European colonial empires. Although local squabbles continued to break out in some places, by and large the never-again idealism of the 1920s was coming true at last. The world was turning away from war as a means of settling its differences."

  "Sounds too idealistic," Duff Cooper murmured.

  "Apart from anything else, the weapons that became possible in later decades made major wars obsolete, anyway," Winslade said "The world had to turn to other ways.

  Scholder continued, "As societies continued to modernize everywhere in the later years of the twentieth century, technological innovation became the primary source of wealth. Eventually, the successful harnessing of the enormous energy concentrations of the atomic nucleus, together with revolutionary electronic methods for processing information and automating work, advances in the biological sciences, and demonstrations of the feasibility of space travel, put a permanent end to fears of limits to growth and the finiteness of resources."

  "So practical application of atomic power is possible, is it?" Lindemann said. "I often used to argue with Rutherford at the Cavendish Lab about that. And the weapons that you mentioned, were they atomic, too? I once estimated that a single device ought to be capable of generating the same explosive power as hundreds of tons of TNT."

  "Actually, it works out at tens of thousands of tons, Professor," Scholder said. "And when you move on into thermonuclear fusion weapons, tens of millions."

  "Oh, good heavens!"

  Scholder resumed, "Through into the twenty-first century, the capitalist world became more socialist and the Communists more commercial as competitive pressures forced a retreat from the extremist doctrines of both sides. Global civilization was established. Living standards soared. Opportunity became available to all. Universal education bred freedom, independence of thought, individualism. The political, racist, and religious fanaticisms from earlier eras waned. The mass movements that they had engendered faded as popular support declined. Reason had triumphed over passion. The first true era of the Common Man had arrived." He finished by tossing his hands up in an animated sigh that seemed, strangely, to ask what had been the point of it all.

  A short silence followed while the guests digested what they had heard. Then Churchill commented, "It sounds Utopian. But you're saying that somebody interfered with the past in order to change it all? Why would anyone have wished that?"

  "The overwhelming majority of people didn't," Scholder replied. "But there were a few who didn't see their situation as quite so Utopian. The world's traditional oligarchies and ruling elites were finding that the people no longer needed them . . . or perhaps had awakened to the realization that they never had. Their power and their privileges were being eroded. They were becoming an endangered species."

  Duff Cooper nodded as the probable sequence of events became clear. "Then the scientific discoveries that you mentioned earlier occurred," he guessed. "These oligarchs gained access to the new knowledge and used it to alter history in a way that would be more to their advantage. Is that what happened?"

  Scholder nodded. "They saw an opportunity to preserve the world in which they had enjoyed the wealth and the status that they considered to be theirs by right," he said. "They saw a chance to learn from, and correct their mistakes. This time there would be no yielding to high-sounding principles of compassion or equality. They would seize total power and use it to resist social change, preserving themselves by ruthlessness, intimidation, and the unrestricted use of force. That is what the Nazi system has been set up to accomplish."

  Winslade straightened up from the chair that he had been leaning on and moved forward to stand at the end of the table. "They were a numerically small group, but still influential, even if their fortunes were on the wane," he said. "An international cabal formed mainly from wealthy hereditary ruling groups, drawn together by a common survival instinct. Their organization was called 'Overlord,' appropriately. Through confidential contacts that their positions enabled them to establish with the scientific community, they set-up the project at a remote location in Brazil. Their machine was known as 'Pipe Organ' for secrecy. It could project about a century back into the past—to be precise, to the year 1925."

  "And that was where you worked," Lindemann checked, looking at Scholder.

  "Yes."

  Lindemann looked puzzled. "And nobody else knew what this place was? That seems unlikely. A scientific breakthrough of such a magnitude couldn't be kept secret, surely."

  "The site that housed Pipe Organ was described officially as an experimental facility involved in a revolutionary method for transferring objects through space," Scholder replied. "The time-travel aspect of the physics was suppressed.

  "But what about the people who worked there, the scientists? They must have known.

  Scholder nodded. "Yes, we knew what the system was, but not what it was being used for. We were told that the far end of the link was a research station established purely to investigate the cause-and-effect mechanism of transfers through time. Only an inner group of the top scientists and officials knew what Pipe Organ was really for."

  "So how did they justify the secrecy to the rest of you?" Lindemann asked.

  "On the grounds that the possible impact of something as stupendous as time-travel needed to be assessed rigorously before any publicity could be risked," Scholder said. "It sounded like a reasonable precaution to take."

  "I see." Lindemann nodded and seemed satisfied.

  Churchill drew on his cigar and nodded slowly to himself as he thought over what had been said. "Their objective was to destroy the Soviet Union," he concluded. "They perceived its unchallenged emergence as the root cause of all their misfortunes, so they set out to destroy it. And their bludgeon to accomplish that end would be Germany."

  "Exactly," Winslade said.

  Eden was puzzled. "So did this, this Overlord organization actually create the Nazis? . . . No, wait a minute, it couldn't have, could it. The Nazis were around before 1925."

  "They exploited them," Winslade said. "There had been the beginnings of the Nazi party back in the Overlord world's past, but it had never come to anything." He began pacing slowly by the windows again and explained, "Once Overlord had gained control of the technology that could give access to the past, they searched the historical record for a situation which, with the hindsight they now had, might have lent itself to being manipulated to their advantage. And they found one. They found an ideal opportunity in the circumstances that had existed in Bavaria in the early 1920s, after the Great War.''

  "Aha�
�enter Corporal Hitler," Churchill murmured.

  Winslade nodded. "The region had become a hotbed of political extremism of every kind, and in particular of reactionary right-wing movements hostile to the Weimar government and all that it stood for. All the roving malcontents from disbanded army units were there, the free-corps bands fighting under officers from the Prussian old guard against the Communists, all committed to repudiating Versailles and restoring the old conservatism and authoritarianism."

  Winslade tossed out a hand casually, as if acknowledging that the rest hardly needed to be spelled out. "In the course of their research. Overlord uncovered a party called the National Socialists, which since 1921 had been led by a former infantry corporal who had been temporarily blinded in a British gas attack at Ypres in 1918. As a party it was different from the rest—the only one that espoused the aims and ideals of the Right, while it applied the methods of the Left. Hitler had a sound grasp of mass psychology. He had launched himself on the popular tide of antirepublicanism, and he played on Germany's need to find scapegoats for its defeat and humiliation. At the same time, he understood the Germans' conditioned dependence on authority figures, and hence the potential appeal of firmness, determination, and violence. And he knew how emotive passions can be roused by the pseudoreligious trappings of ritual, color, pageantry, and most of all, a symbol. Perhaps one of the greatest inspirations of his misdirected genius was his design of a black swastika in a white circle on a blood-red flag as the emblem of the Nazi movement." Winslade stopped pacing and turned to spread his hands in a brief gesture of appeal. "A formidable combination, gentlemen. But not sufficient on its own to turn a tiny, unheard-of, political debating group into a militant force capable of taking over a nation."

  "Hitler had the kinds of ideas that Overlord could harness to its own ends, and he had the drive to turn them into action . . . but he was impetuous and inexperienced. His attempt to seize control of Bavaria at gunpoint in 1923 failed dismally. He was arrested and locked up for a year in Landberg, and when he came out he found the party banned and its leaders feuding and falling away. He himself was prohibited from public speaking for two years. Chancellor Stresemann's policy of reconciliation with the Allies was succeeding, the French occupation troops were leaving the Ruhr, and Dr. Schacht had stabilized the currency. Prosperity was returning, and nobody wanted to hear about Nazism anymore. The Nazis had flourished in the bad times. Hitler was a fanatic and never ceased preaching his ideology of racism and hatred, but he didn't have the organizing ability to build and hold together a structure that would endure. And as the good times continued getting better through the late twenties, he faded away."

  Winslade sighed and gazed at his audience with an expression of mock sadness. "It was such a tragic waste of talent. If only Hitler had know how to recruit, organize, and keep his party intact, he'd have been perfectly situated to take advantage of the bad times when they came back again after the Wall Street Crash in October 1929. Hitler didn't know that was coming, of course . . . but Overlord did. They'd blueprinted everything he needed to do to prepare for the situation, and their first agents from 2025 arrived in Germany in 1925 to begin his education. Their return-gate was operational by the following year, completing the two-way connection, and everything that's happened since has been the unfolding of the Overlord plan."

  Winslade paused; his listeners were too astounded to respond. He continued, "By various stratagems, what had been merely an economic recession in Overlord's world was engineered into the worldwide slump that you've seen in this one. The Bruening-Hugenberg alliance that we mentioned earlier, for example, was prevented from happening by Hitler's joining forces with Hugenberg instead. The Inukai assassination was another part of the economic sabotage carried out by three agents sent back from 2025 for the purpose, who left Hamburg on a ship bound for Tokyo in February 1932."

  Winslade nodded solemnly in response to the four incredulous stares greeting him from along the table. "Yes, gentlemen," he told them, "the whole Nazi operation as it exists today is being masterminded from almost a century in the future via a two-way transfer channel operating in Germany at this very moment. It has been going on since 1926. And the results require no elaboration. In the world that we have now, Hitler didn't just fade away at the end of the twenties. When Wall Street collapsed and the world reeled, he was ready and waiting with a thoroughly prepared campaign to capitalize on the people's disappointments and misfortunes, and on all of postwar Germany's fears, resentments, insecurities, and hopes.

  "Yes, indeed, I think you'll agree that, with some help from his invisible friends, Corporal Hitler has managed admirably to bring events onto a course much more to his liking this second time around."

  CHAPTER 6

  A NIGHTCLUB IN THE cold light of morning was like last night's lover without her wig and makeup, or a movie theater when the show is over and the lights come on. The magic and the make-believe were gone, and only the reality that had been there all along remained.

  Harry Ferracini yawned as he sipped a black coffee at one of the tables in front of the bar. He pictured in his mind the noisy, boisterous world of glitter, color, jitterbugging bodies, and laughing faces that had existed there a few hours previously. Now the place was transformed by bright yellow lights that revealed pipes and ducts below a ceiling previously lost in shadow, cables hanging between the spotlamps, and chipped paint at the bottoms of the walls. Chairs were upturned on top of most of the tables, the carpets in the aisles between them had been rolled back, and a white-haired janitor in a red flannel undershirt, a cleaning rag hanging from his back pocket, was mopping the floor. Cassidy and a few others were still at the bar talking to Lou, the bartender, while he restocked his shelves. Janet was standing by the edge of the dance floor crooning "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" in a husky, off-key, blues voice, accompanied by a bored-looking, cigarette-smoking piano player. Somehow, she had changed into a sweater and slacks. Ferracini tried to remember . . . oh, yes, she'd gone home sometime between two and three in the morning to get some sleep because she had a mid-morning rehearsal tomorrow. That meant this was tomorrow, he decided.

  The rest of what had ended up as a pretty wild night now existed only as a series of disconnected recollections. He and Cassidy had started out at the place on West Thirty-fourth Street; Cassidy upset the boyfriend of the redhead in the green dress. There had been the three Irish guys in the small bar with the accordion player, the ex-fighter with all the stories somewhere else, the two sailors with the chorus girls, and the pimp trying hard to sell them a "better place down the street. They'd met Janet and her friend, Amy, later, talked a lot, and come back with them to the place where Janet worked four nights a week as a singer—Ferracini couldn't remember the name of it. Things probably wouldn't have gotten so bad if it hadn't been Ed's birthday.

  Ed, long since disappeared, was a buddy of Max, the owner, who was sitting at the next table, remonstrating with two men about city taxes and the costs of repairs. Short and stockily built, with a high, tanned forehead and crinkly hair, his tie and vest loosened and jacket thrown over the chair next to him, Max looked like someone who had been born to worry. He had taken a liking to Ferracini and Cassidy after Janet introduced them, and had invited them to stay on with his circle of after-hours friends, a half dozen or so of whom were asleep in a variety of postures around the room. Apparently, Max had been having trouble with a local small-time gangster who was trying to put a protection squeeze on the business, and he was eager to beef up the ranks of his regular customers with men who seemed to know how to look after themselves.

  New York City, 1939, was a far cry from the drabness of the austere, authoritarian America that Ferracini was used to. Just walking around Manhattan, watching the bustling crowds and looking at the goods on display in the store windows had been an experience. Being among people who were free to work as they chose, to buy anything they could pay for, to go anywhere they wished, and to become anything they were capable of becoming had
been like breathing fresh air for the first time. Admittedly, the picture had a seedier underside, but maybe that seediness was the inevitable flip side of the coin. In a society where people were free to be whatever they wanted, some would turn out bad. Unconstrained, the spectrum would expand to extremes in both directions.

  Yet at the same time, Ferracini felt anger and frustration. He had found post-Depression America—the real America that he had seen in the farmers, the ranch-hands, the miners, the loggers, the factory workers, the storekeepers, and the truckers that he had talked to all the way from Albuquerque to New York—barely dented in strength and spirit, lean, tough, and proud to have pulled itself through the worst without sacrificing its ideal of personal liberty, as so much of Europe had been forced to do. Here was what should have become the nucleus of a world alliance that could have taken Hitler apart.

  But instead, America was squandering itself and partying all night, as it would while Europe fell to the Nazis, while Japan invaded Asia, and until Russia was destroyed. Then America would wake up, but by then, it would be too late. The colored lights and glitter of the make-believe would be gone, and only cold, gray, cheerless dawn would remain. Claud believed it could all be changed. Ferracini thought Claud was crazy.

  "Ain't that right, Harry?" Max asked from the next table.

  "What? I wasn't listening."

  "We're gonna be seeing a lot more of you and Cowboy around here now. Guys who know Max get looked after okay. Get into the best places in town, no sweat. Meet lots of girls— nice girls, know what I mean? Max is a good friend."

  "Yeah, why not? We'll see, Max."

  "See, Harry's a smart guy. What'd I tell ya?"

  "What line are you in, Harry?" one of the two men sitting with Max asked, tossing back the last of a drink. Max had introduced him earlier as Johnny.

  Ferracini made an empty-handed gesture just as a blonde called Pearl came over from the bar and slid into a chair opposite. "Nothing in particular right now," he said. "Done a little bit of this, a little bit of that. . . . You know how it is."