The Proteus Operation Page 9

  The experiments confirmed the practicability of fission— as isolated atomic events, that is. The list of unknowns that would have to be answered before the energy theoretically available from the nucleus could be tapped on a usable scale was daunting, however. Accordingly, after their initial excitement, the American scientists resigned themselves to many more years of patience and perseverance before a working device of any kind—bomb or power source—would be even in sight.

  The news of the German weapons used against Russia in 1942, therefore, came as a shock. None of the experts could explain it. Hastily reversing his previous policies of tolerance and good will toward the dictatorships, President Burton K. Wheeler, who had been elected in 1940 on a strongly isolationist platform following Roosevelt's retirement from public life, gave top priority to a comparable U.S. program. At the same time, Wheeler commissioned a select group drawn from the various intelligence services to investigate and account for the astounding speed of the German research and development effort. Thus, a new team of specialists dedicated to scientific intelligence-gathering came into being, which in time grew larger and found itself a permanent place among the government's less publicized institutions. The group was designated "SI-7."

  Remoteness from the scene of events, the difficulties of operating in Nazi Europe, and the rigorous secrecy maintained by the opposition all hampered progress, but the picture that emerged as the pieces fell into place indicated that there had been something very strange about the whole German nuclear program.

  After Hahn and Strassmann published their results early in 1939, a number of speculative papers by German authors on bombs and power reactors had appeared in scientific journals, and further studies were initiated by the Ordnance Branch of the Army, the Reich Ministry of Education, a research laboratory of the Post Office, and several private concerns. But these activities were never effectively coordinated, and although the Germans were quick to ban the export of ores from the mines they had acquired in Czechoslovakia, their overall program suffered from competition among the different groups for uranium metal and oxide as well as other resources, from withholding of information, and from the jealousies that tend to arise in totalitarian bureaucracies.

  With such constraints, the program shouldn't have had a hope of yielding an atomic bomb in anywhere near three years. And indeed, the records that SI-7 unearthed showed a hodgepodge of impractical attempts at reactor construction, a glaring theoretical error that had gone undiscovered for over half a year, and no evidence of the major industrial installations essential for weapons manufacture. Nevertheless, weapons had appeared, as if out of nowhere, in the summer of. 1942. How, remained a mystery for many years.

  By the early 1960s, further work by SI-7 had established that the puzzle of Nazi atomic research was not an isolated instance; similar anomalies existed in other areas of German technological development, too, such as the electronics being applied in the Nazi military and space programs, their advances in computer technology, and their development of high-performance aircraft. In all cases, innovations had appeared that couldn't be traced to identifiable origins, but which again seemed to have appeared ahead of their time, out of nowhere.

  That this should be so was all the more baffling since it represented the opposite of what had been expected from the Nazi system. Serving no other purpose than to perpetuate the absolute power of its ruling clique, Nazism stifled free expression and dissent, repressing all forms of original thought and substituting instead its own barren slogans and mindless dogmas. Such a system could never support a truly creative process of free scientific enquiry. It was totally parasitic. As with the material wealth that it was unable to create but could only loot, so it was incapable of creating new knowledge; it could only consume what was ready-made and available for it to conscript by force.

  Gradually, a common underlying pattern emerged: The real innovations, it turned out, had not been due to any ongoing process of general discovery; instead, they all stemmed from a sudden and astounding leap forward in concepts and theory that had taken place in virtually all of the sciences during a brief period of only a few years, beginning in the early forties. After that, the curve of new discovery ceased abruptly and reached a plateau. That was what had enabled the U.S. to catch up. It was as if an advance deposit of information had been credited to Hitler's account to be drawn on for the next twenty years. Where had it come from?

  The answer came out of the work that Claud Winslade had been involved in ever since the time of Europe's fall, which overlapped but was separate from SI-7's operations. For over twenty years, Winslade and his group had been piecing together another story that went back to the twenties and thirties, and which had grown more bizarre and more incredible as each new fact fell into place. This story involved, among other things, documents spirited out of top-secret German archives, which contained references to names, places, and organizations that nobody had ever heard of. There were descriptions of scientific concepts and theories that were unfamiliar even to experts. Mysterious names kept recurring, of people whose records had been faked to make it appear they had lived normal lives in Germany, whereas, in fact, they seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, just like the German scientific discoveries that were preoccupying SI-7. And most extraordinary of all, there were repeated mentions of dates and events that appeared to have taken place not in any recorded period at all, but in the twenty-first century!

  And that, Winslade's group finally deduced, was the thread that tied all of those mysteries together. Unbelievable as it was, the whole phenomenon—Nazism, the rise of Hitler, the spread of totalitarianism in the early part of the century— had been engineered and remote-directed from the twenty-first century. Winslade's group even produced drawings and design data for Pipe Organ, the machine that had initiated the connection, and for the secret Nazi installation called "Valhalla" that contained the return-gate back to it. Some individuals who had transferred back from the future for one reason or another were still in Germany, after being trapped in the twentieth century when the Nazi leaders had the Valhalla machine destroyed sometime around the mid-forties. A few of those people were contacted and smuggled out, despite their being held under conditions of maximum security, and brought to tell their story firsthand at the White House. Kurt Scholder was one of them.

  A detailed study ordered by the President in the late sixties concluded that enough information had been collected for the United States to build a Pipe-Organ-type device of its own with a good chance of success, even if some of the theoretical issues remained obscure. So perhaps the West could prevent the doom that appeared to be inevitable by trying some meddling in history of its own.

  One major limitation, however, presented itself. The range of such a device—the maximum time back in the past that it could reach—was related to the energy density attainable from the source used to power it. Pipe Organ had utilized an extremely high density fusion process, which was what had enabled it to project back a hundred years to 1925. Fusion technology was not available in the world of the early seventies. The next best thing would be a dedicated high-temperature fission process, for which calculations indicated that the greatest range attainable would be a little over a third of that for fusion, that is, "to sometime around late 1938 or early 1939, assuming four years to build the machine and the components for its return-gate.

  The period before that date would be "frozen"—inaccessible—and therefore immune to being altered. There could be no changing the things that had already happened in the world: Hitler established in Germany; Hitler's takeovers of the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia; Munich; the Spanish Civil War; Mussolini in control of Italy; Abyssinia; the Sino-Japanese war in Manchuria. There was no way around being stuck with all of it.

  Every day lost would freeze another twenty-four hours of events into the sequence of unalterable history. President Kennedy ordered a crash program to be launched immediately, and the Proteus mission departed on schedule four year
s later, in 1975.

  CHAPTER 8

  "AN AMAZING STORY!" ANTHONY Eden exclaimed when Bannering finished describing the intelligence activities that had led up to Proteus. Eden, immaculately attired, as usual, in a three-piece suit of dark charcoal herringbone and wearing the homburg hat that had become as much a public symbol as Chamberlains umbrella, continued staring out of the taxicab window for a while. The traffic tangle at the corner of Trafalgar Square sorted itself out under the no-nonsense direction of a walrus-mustached bobby in pointed helmet and neck-high tunic, and the cab began moving again. "So what happened finally with Heydrich's prophecy of getting to the moon by 1968?" he asked. "Did they do it?"

  Bannering shook his head. "The Nazi space program ran into difficulties, mainly through a poverty of innovation, as had been predicted. They'd spent their capital. America, on the other hand, had enjoyed an enormous influx of talented refugees from all over the place and was reinvesting the profits. Both sides put up permanently manned orbital platforms in the same year—1970. In fact, the U.S. was drawing ahead in a number of fields by then."

  "But not enough to avert a clash eventually," Eden said.

  "It could hold the dictators at bay for a while, but they had a preponderance of brute force and the lion's share of global resources. It was clear that when they realized time was only widening the gap against them . . ." Bannering made an empty-handed gesture and left the sentence unfinished.

  Eden stroked a finger through his thick mustache. "I don't know, landing a man on the moon . . . It sounds like something out of one of Winston's H.G. Wells stories. Is it possible at all, do you think?"

  "Oh, certainly," Bannering assured him. "In fact, in the world that Kurt came from originally, they did it. And I'm sure the America I knew would have been able to do the same in time, if it hadn't been forced to dedicate the national effort to defense and catching up with the Nazis."

  "They did it? You mean they actually got there—a man on the moon?"

  "Yes, in the late seventies."

  "Amazing! And what did they find there?"

  "A lot of rocks and dust. It's not really my department, Tony. You should ask Kurt about it when he gets back if you're interested. He's always happy to talk about things like that. . . at least, if Lindemann's questions haven't driven him to distraction by now."

  Kurt Scholder had gone off under a suitable alias with Lindemann for a few days to see some of the defense work being done in the physics laboratories at Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, and also at some of the government establishments with which Lindemann had connections. Scholder was hoping to meet some of the better-known physicists of the day, such as Erwin Schrodinger and Max Born, whose escapes Lindemann had helped organize during his visits to Germany in earlier years.

  Winslade had left the hotel with Bannering and Eden, but they had dropped him off at Westminster to collect Churchill, who had scheduled a private session with Prime Minister Chamberlain that morning to impress upon him the gravity of the European situation and to plead for more vigor in strengthening the armed forces and speeding up industry. Everyone who had been present at the initial meeting at the Dorchester had agreed, however, that they couldn't risk bringing Chamberlain into the Proteus secret at that time. Many members of the upper echelons of British society were sympathetic to the Nazi cause and blind to its menace, and Chamberlain's true loyalties and dispositions were uncertain. There was no telling who the information might have found its way to; the risk of a leak back to Berlin was the last thing the team could afford.

  In July, the return-gate being built in New York would become fully operational, putting the present Roosevelt administration in direct contact with President Kennedy and the task group standing by in 1975. At that point, the Proteus team's primary objective would be accomplished, and what happened after that would be out of their hands. Their aim in the meantime was to advance Britain's state of preparedness to the greatest degree possible. To that end, Eden had been busy helping to mobilize the support of the leading public figures who had spoken out for firmness and stronger defense measures, such as Lord Cecil and Lord Lloyd, and Sir Robert Home, and Messrs. Grigg, Boothby, and Bracken, while Duff Cooper was meeting with publishers to call for a louder note of urgency in the popular press. Churchill himself had accepted the task of prevailing upon Chamberlain and other cabinet ministers directly. Winslade would be bringing him for lunch at the Athenaeum Club to compare notes on the morning's efforts.

  There was time to spare before they were due at the Athenaeum, and Bannering suggested an appetizer in a small pub off Cockspur Street that he had been fond of using in his previous existence in London. Eden agreed, and the cabbie dropped them off with a chirpy "Ta, guv." as Bannering added a tip to the fare. They were not far from the Foreign Office, and as Bannering and Eden began walking, Bannering resumed his unconscious habit of scrutinizing the passing faces.

  "You needn't bother looking this week, Arthur," Eden said, grinning as he noticed. "You're not here."

  "What? What do you mean, not here?"

  "Out of uncontainable curiosity I took something of a liberty, I'm afraid, and checked up on you with a friend of mine in the F.O. who works with Halifax," Eden said. Lord Halifax had been Foreign Secretary since Eden's resignation a year previously, in February 1938. "Yes, you are working there, in D14 under Saunders-Blenkinson, as you said."

  "Well, I'm relieved to hear it," Bannering replied, with just a hint of indignation in his voice.

  "But this week they've sent you to Paris to see Bonnet's people. Had you forgotten?"

  Bannering frowned for a second, then nodded. "Yes, that's right—it was to do with that Franco-German friendship thing. Did I go this week?"

  "Yes. You're not due back until Saturday."

  There was a pause. "You know, Tony, I'm still not sure if I believe this whole business."

  They entered the pub and climbed a short stairway to an upstairs lounge. Eden bought two gin-and-tonics at the bar, and they carried them over to a table in a far corner, secluded from inquisitive ears by carved partitioning and potted plants. "Haven't been here before," Eden said as they sat down. "Quite a cozy little place, isn't it?"

  The friendship agreement between Germany and France had been concluded in December. Through it, Germany hoped to loosen France's alliance with England; it had pried Poland away from its Western ties with a nonaggression pact in 1934. But Eden very much doubted if the signings of these sacred pieces of paper, solemnly ritualized before trusting peoples as if tablets were coming down from on high, really meant anything that mattered. "Nothing matters very much," Lord Balfour had said once. "And very few things matter at all."

  "Penny?" Bannering said, watching his face.

  Eden searched his mind for something else to talk about. "Last night at Winston's flat—you'd just started telling us about Hitler's early days," he said. "But then Randolph arrived and we all went on to something else. We'd been talking about Versailles. . . ."

  Bannering nodded. He took a drink and set his glass down on the table. "We don't seem to have learned a lot in two thousand years, do we. The Romans would never have made the same mistakes, you know."

  "Yes, I've read Machiavelli, too," Eden replied.

  The Romans had a simple policy for dealing with vanquished enemies: they were either very generous, or else they were very harsh. Either they installed defeated kings in palaces with slaves, horses, guards, and more power than they had dreamed of before in their own realms, thus guaranteeing strong defenders who would always be loyal to Rome; or they would get rid of them permanently, along with most of their families and followers. The rationale was that anyone given reason for harboring a grudge shouldn't be left strong enough to do anything about settling it. At Versailles and after, the Allies had broken every rule by not only leaving strong enemies with a grudge, but in addition giving up their own power to defend themselves.

  "Reparations was a misguided concept from the start," Bannering said.
"You can't hope to cover the costs of a war by plunder these days. Modern industrialized economies are too interdependent. All it did was throw world cash flow into chaos. America was getting back about a fifth of what it was paying out to Germany in high-risk loans."

  "A lot of people knew that at the time," Eden agreed. "But nobody had the courage to say so to electorates that had put up with four years of war and were demanding revenge."

  Bannering nodded. "But the biggest mistake was leaving the traditional German power structure intact, still controlled by conservatives and monarchists who would never accept the regime that the West was trying to impose. The ingredients for a revolution were there from the beginning. Hitler saw a road to power. Overlord saw a weapon to hurl against Russia."

  Eden sat back in his chair and looked distantly up at the ceiling. "The impact must have been stunning," he mused. "Just imagine Hitler and Goering being confronted by people from years in the future who say they want to help promote the cause. How would somebody react to something like that?"

  Bannering blinked in surprise. "Well, you should know, Tony," he said. Eden laughed, and they finished their drinks.

  "Good for another?" Bannering asked.

  Eden pulled his watch from a vest pocket and flipped open the lid. "Yes, there's time. Why not?"

  "On me this time." Bannering went to the bar and a minute later returned with two refills.

  "So Overlord took over Hitler's early operation." Eden said, prompting Bannering to continue.

  "Yes. They spelled out the conditions that the Nazis would have to satisfy for their next power bid. Essentially they were one, an appearance of legality—the real revolution would take place only after power had already been secured by constitutional means. Two, the Army would be for the takeover this time, not against it. And three, they'd need the active backing of at least some of the respected institutions of finance and business. Overlord's agents practically ran the party's Brown House headquarters in Munich. They planned the organization and recruiting, and they dreamed up the Nazi state within a state, complete with all its offices and departments, that would be ready to emerge overnight to replace the existing structure of government when the time came."