Raising the Conqueror
Merlin Douglas Larsen
Raising the Conqueror
An alternate history novel by Merlin Douglas Larsen
Copyright © 2012 Merlin Douglas Larsen
Published by Merlin Douglas Larsen at Smashwords
No part of this book may be used for commercial purposes without the author’s consent.
Contact the author at: douglarsen50@msn.com
Chapter One
The pilot of the Bristol Beaufighter brought the aircraft in low over the tops of the mountains. His primitive radar blipped the location of the airfield. In the blackness of the Highlands night, nothing was visible outside the windows except a few stars. It was a blackout below all over Britain. The Luftwaffe sent bombers every night, and by now, all the main airfields and mustering stations had been discovered to their relentless raids. But as the pilot skillfully cleared the heights and dipped down, the narrow runway ahead and to the left was momentarily visible as the lights along either side of it flashed on and off several times. A curt radio message from the pilot told the personnel anticipating the Beaufighter's arrival that he was on target and they dispensed with the lights. Secrecy was paramount.
The pilot was still jittery. Even after he had successfully set his plane down and taxied over to the hanger, built within the mountains of the Glen More nan Albin, he was still sweating bullets. It was not because he had been particularly worried by the challenge of the flight. It was the passengers he carried that had unsettled him.
As the Beaufighter rolled up to the hanger door, the pilot cut the engines and the profound silence of the Highlands night enfolded the men. Aside from the pilot and his copilot, there were only four passengers, crammed into the narrow tunnel of the fuselage. The dapper older man in the bowler hat smiled at the pilot.
"Well done, Captain," he said, as he and the others arose stiffly and moved crouched for the hatchway.
"Thank you, Sir Winston," said the pilot.
The ground crew swung the hatch aside and a pair of under-secretaries leaped out, fully-armed as was customary. They were, first of all, Commandos and bodyguard. They helped the Marshal of the Empire emerge from the freezing fuselage into the equally-freezing open air.
After the Marshal came Duke "Monty". He alighted briskly without aid.
The ground crewmen surrounded the Beaufighter and muscled it inside. By then, the Marshal of the Empire and Duke of Montgomery had disappeared in the company of the Castellan of Augustus.
After very brief greetings between the old comrades, the Castellan escorted his commanding officers to a waiting lorry and they set out at once. Ahead of and behind them, a pair of lorries went packed with Commandos as escort.
Once on their way, Castellan Richard de Monteith could no longer restrain himself.
"Sir Winston, what makes this hazardous, midnight journey so imperative? You should not risk yourself in such a manner. We need you now more than ever."
The Marshal smiled, showing his yellow teeth. He removed his cigar with a gloved hand.
"All in good time, Richard, all in good time. We will explain everything. But I would rather do it only the once. I so hate repeating myself needlessly.
"Tell me," he continued, changing the subject, "how is the Lady Stella and my godson?"
The Castellan sighed inwardly, knowing that Winston could not be drawn out, once his mind was set, and so for the balance of the drive to Castle Augustus he answered his commander's questions upon family matters. Throughout the cold ride, Duke "Monty" rode in silence and smoked two pipes, a solemn, distant expression upon his usually conceited face.
Despite the lateness of the hour, once they had arrived in the bailey of Castle Augustus, Sir Winston immediately called the council. Once the officers were convened, he surprised the Castellan by asking:
"And where are the persons engaged upon the "Project?" “
"Working, some of them I suppose," said Castellan Monteith. "The most of them are sleeping by now."
"Wake those who are sleeping and summon all of them here."
Without delay, the Castellan did as commanded. Soon a dozen or so men and one woman were arriving with puzzled expressions and sleepy eyes.
The Marshal stood as they entered, and with affable gestures from his cigar stub indicated where he wanted them to sit. Then, when all were settled, he tucked his walking stick behind his back and began to pace slowly around the long, narrow and drafty room as he spoke. No one could tell by the normality of his voice and the staid confidence of his round face that he was a desperate and worried man.
"Let me wax pedantic for a while, my friends. When I am finished, you will forgive me, if I state some facts of recent history which are only obvious to us all. But I want no one here to be under false pretenses, that we might have other alternatives open to us now. The situation is worse than you think, and they are out to get us."
He paused and smiled thinly at his own wit.
"When Chamberlain resigned and I was appointed by the King in his place, the situation was already far beyond our ability to remedy. I did not admit this to anyone openly. But I will say it now. If what I intend to do here fails, it will make little or no difference if I am later accused of treasonous talk.
"As I say, the situation with the Nazis was far out of hand when I came to the command of our armed forces once again. We tried to hold them in North Africa, and "Monty" barely managed to bring the main part of his army back to England. We tried to restrict their advances in France, and Dunkirk was a bloody disaster. I lost my son there, and many families in the realm can claim even greater sacrifices made than I. Now, the French are under the Imperial yoke along with the Poles, the Italians and the Spanish. The Norse are going down soon along with the rest, and then we shall look forward to the moot challenge of facing a two-pronged invasion from the north added to the south.
"The Czar is impotent. Our alliance with the Russians has gained for us nothing. Alexander has thought to obtain a little leniency by dickering with Hitler, but I shall not be surprised to learn that the Wehrmacht has rolled across the Ukraine.
"And now, our fair islands have been under assault these nine months and more. The enemy is massing in Sussex to make an all-out push on London in the spring. By then, the Italian army will have been added to the German legions. Our air forces are all but shot out of the skies, our ranks filled with the lamentable but expedient presence of thralls under arms. We are at our last and most desperate defense. And, I will admit to you all, it is a hopeless one."
The faces of his listeners, save "Monty's" and the under-secretaries', were aghast at the bluntness of Marshal Winston's words. Propaganda denied what he had just then so forthrightly admitted was the real truth.
"How did this deplorable fate come upon us?" the Marshal continued. "Was there nothing we could have done to avert such a final calamity? I have asked myself that question countless times.
"When Hitler gained the election and became Imperial Chancellor, that was the fatal stroke. If we could have foreseen his vast ambitions ten years ago, we might have done something desperate but effective to remove the devil from this world.
"Before that, what could we have done? Trying to kill him would have been anything but certain. Heaven knows, our allies have attempted this often enough by now. The presence of our secret friends here tonight is clear evidence, if we needed any, that not all Germans are Nazis at heart nor find Hitler's world rosy.
"Before Hitler even came to power, he was already dreaming of the greatness he has always felt should be his and his peoples'. The Great War only firmed that resolve in the Teutonic mind. The Emperor today is a mere puppet to the Nazis. Hitler is the true power in the Holy Roman Empire. All the world knows this, from Cathay to the Atlantic Colonies, no one will escape his domination once we are defeated. The U-boats already cut us off from any aid we might have gained from the Americas, which would have been little enough in any case. The subjects of His Majesty there are opposed by the might of the Spanish colonies, now that they have joined the Axis.
"The King's father could have avoided war in France, and then we would have faced this dire predicament even sooner. So I do not fault the policy then which took us over the Channel as their allies against the common enemy.
"No. To find the fork in the road where we went wrong, in our ignorance, we must look further back. Back, my friends, to when the Germans were at our mercy and we gave it. Yes, I am speaking of the Grand Armistice of 1864, when Louis and our King Henry allowed the Emperor to talk his way out of being punished for his excesses in the Italian Piedmont. The Pope's army had bowed to the invader and given Maximilian his coveted imperial crowning. The Angevins of Piedmont rebelled and held forth nearly alone for the papal rights, even after the Pope himself had abandoned them to avert the calamity of having to face yet another antipope. Louis marched to the aid of his son's people, and when the Germans met him in battle he beat them. But they were too many, and he looked for Britain to come into the war on his side. We did so. But Maximilian was crafty. When the war reached his own borders, he sued for peace while he yet held a formidable force in hand. And rather than press on with the unsavory duty of a lengthy invasion, loss of life, great misery and cost, our sovereign and the French king struck a limp bargain. They took honor in exchange for future security. The praise of the world they accepted rather than the horrors of a just and necessary war. Then followed a period of uneasy peace, while the Germans built up their strength and we and the French held a parting of the ways, as we have done so often in the past. When we no longer needed each other, we found petty matters to argue about to our mutual hurt. While we allowed Maximilian and his successors to divert us, they were readying for war once more. It burst upon the French like an avalanche and swept right up to the very gates of Paris before we arrived and helped stem the tide. It went on, back and forth for years. In the end, we held them, but only by a hair's breadth. The Germans did not have the power to finish us off, and we could not launch a counter attack. The Second Armistice was, on the face of it, supposed to renew all the fine sounding promises of the Grand Armistice. But it was only words, mere empty words. Chamberlain was a fool then. He allowed the Emperor to talk us into another long peaceful truce, for that is all it amounted to. The King agreed with Chamberlain, despite my strongest denials against their folly. Professor Einstein here was in the forefront of that battle of words. He knows it all too well: the Nazis are death to his people."
The aging physicist smiled wanly and nodded at the Marshal's words.
"We are paying the price for their folly today," Einstein said. "In many respects, it is accurate to say that this has been all one and the same war. History will look back upon this century and the last and will call it the Hundred Years War."
Marshal Winston stopped pacing and looked at them all before speaking again.
"Now. What is it that I propose to do? What can be done at this late hour? Before I answer that question, I want Duke Montgomery to tell you how stands the situation in the south of England. Monty?"
The tough, wiry general stood up and began to pace where the Marshal had been. Winston lowered himself slowly into a heavy oak chair.
"We have a formidable defensive force drawn up along the north bank of the Thames," he said in his high-pitched voice. As he spoke, he nodded to an under-secretary, who immediately deployed a large map of Britain upon an easel.
"We have been holding back fighter groups in Ireland and Scotland, as safe from long range bombing as possible, in readiness for the Nazi attack. It is pointless to waste our strength, simply pointless, trying to bring down bombers when they are covered by fighter escorts that outnumber our boys by a factor of nearly twenty to one. So we will husband our strength, and make the Huns pay dearly for control of our skies when they launch their legions against us in the spring. They shall pay a very dear price indeed. All winter, we have been digging in across the Thames from the enemy. Bristol is one solid concrete network of bunkers and tank traps. The coasts are all mined and our best units are brigaded in small garrisons from the Thames to the Firth of Forth. Meanwhile, we have been hastily training our thralls and arming them. They shall bear the brunt of the first assaults, naturally. Then our regular battalions will reinforce the line where needed. The Irish Sea is still ours. The Navy is in command of the channels, and not even Hitler has dared to contest with us there as yet. When the main assault comes, it will undoubtedly fall upon the Thames. It cannot conceivably fall anywhere else but along the Thames. And we shall hold out gloriously. Hitler will rue the day he threw his best at London. Have it he will, in the end: we cannot stop him and he will have London. But the price will take all joy out of his victory. We shall leave him a ruined and lifeless wilderness. The Nazis will get nothing from us but a lifeless wilderness and ruins. It is all we can hope for."
He sat down and lit another pipe.
Chapter Two.
Marshal Winston remained sitting. A long silence filled the ancient chamber of the castle. Outside, it was deepest night and as silent as the grave. Several of those gathered to the room fancied that they could hear the faint patter of bombs at Inverness.
Finally, the Marshal leaned slowly forward and laid his arms upon the table top, his fat fingers interlinked.
"I will tell you what the code name is for what you have been working on here," he said to the gathered scientists, and he looked at his old friend Einstein as he spoke.
"The Raptor Project. It is apt. For I plan to stoop, not on the wind as a true raptor, but rather I will stoop low enough to take a desperate gamble. We have nothing to lose."
"You will not use the uranium bomb," said Bohr, the Danish physicist, with alarm.
"No, of course not," frowned Winston. "What do you take me for, man? I am not a monster. You are working for the Good Guys, as they say in America. And because of past assurances from me and from the King, you have made certain that Hitler's own atomic researches do not provide his arsenal with such weapons either. No gentlemen, and madam," (he spoke aside to Lise Meitner) "I do not threaten to go against what we agreed with you in the beginning."
(It was a terrible risk the German physicists underwent, to pretend at home that they were devout Nazis, and yet come several times a year to the lab at Castle Augustus, incognito, to work for the British government. Meitner, Hahn and Strassmann all had Winston's highest admiration.)
"I am not interested in atomic research if building weapons of mass destruction is the mere result," said the Marshal. "The world is better off dead if we ever sink so low.
"I am ready, however, to make use of Professor Einstein's machine."
"The Unified Field Machine is nowhere ready," said Einstein.
"You have tested it," said the Marshal. "You wrote and told me so. You sounded very excited, my friend."
The little man shook his shaggy head.
"No, no, no. I tested a tiny model. I sent an apple back, and I cannot even now tell you for certain where it ended up."
"You have built a larger Machine," said Winston quietly, inexorably.
"Yes! But it is too dangerous to even think of such a thing. The space-time continuum is bound to the stability of particula of the minutest size and arrangement. To split even a small piece of it is a disruption that you have not imagined, have not experienced."
"You do not even hear what I have to propose, and yet you oppose me?" said the Marshal.
"I know what you want to do," said Einstein, standing up and pointing an index finger at the commander-in-chief. "I can put two and two together and come up with e = mc2. You want to send someone back to tamper with the past. You want to avoid the Grand Armistice. Am I right?"
"Something like," said Winston, and his little smile was terrible.
"Well, I will not do it. I will not be a part of this."
"You have no choice."
"Do not tell me this. We all have a choice. You cannot take this away. And I tell you, I will not have any part in this proposal of yours. It is madness to even think of it."
"Then you must be mad, all of you, for what else have you been doing here all of these years? Now, we have a real need, an immediate need, for your knowledge. What is the worst that can happen?"
Einstein, thought about that. He rubbed his head with his fingertips before answering. His wild hairs seemed even more disarrayed than was usual.
"You risk having a world you do not recognize, maybe one that does not include any of us at all. You could even stop the world, sometime in the past. A chain reaction could affect even the quanta of light in outer space and ultimately alter or even destroy the universe as it is. We do not know. That is the terrible thing: we have discovered this terrible secret when we split the uranium atom: that we can split the gravitational fields of particula, of space itself, and briefly open up holes where time does not seem to exist. And regardless of how big the hole, and how long it is there, the time that has existed there is conflated to a single moment: So my experiments with time measurement using full-spectrum light have told me. But we do not know anything about how to quantify it, nor even how to determine if the effects have an end when the hole closes. It may be, that my apple has started the beginning or ending of something, whenever it is that I sent it, and one day we will all find out in a manner that will most probably be unpleasant. I have nightmares about it, my Lord."
Marshal Winston was unmoved.
"What is the world, as we know it, going to be like after the Nazi darkness has overtaken everyone? Is it a world where your people can hope to live? What of the other victims of the Nazi oppression? The Jews are only at the head of their list. There are many others. If you will not hazard the experiment, then you consign them to death and worse."
"But the far-reaching consequences!" Einstein practically screamed.
"Bugger the far-reaching consequences!" Winston boomed."You are afraid of a chimera. I am afraid of tomorrow. I mean to do whatever I can to save it. If God disagrees with me, then he may intervene. Up till now, he does not seem to have minded too much that you have been tampering with his province."
"Leave God out of this," said Einstein. "He does not conform to either mine nor your knowledge of him, of this I am certain."
The Marshal lit a new cigar and added its pungent pollution to "Monty's" pipe and the haze of cigarette smoke that hovered over the table.
"Whatever his nature, God has not seen fit to interfere with your work. I take that as a sign of his approval."
"Take his silence for what you will. I have a choice, and I say 'no', there will be no splitting of the Unified Field."
Lise Meitner raised her hand.
"Lord Winston, I will work the Machine for you."
"Lise!" shouted Einstein.
"And if you are wanting someone to volunteer to take the journey, I offer myself," she said without acknowledging her colleague's outburst.
"Bless you," said Winston. "But that will not be necessary. I have already selected a fine chap to go for us."
He looked over his shoulder at where the two under-secretaries sat silently against the wall. The darker of the two smiled thinly. He was of uncertain race to the people in the room. He could hail from southern France, or Spain, or Italy. Or just as easily, he could have old Ukrainian blood mixed into his British heritage. But Winston happened to know, that what added the swarthy quality to his young friend's body was a tincture of Amerindian blood. His mother was daughter to Winston's own aunt, and that family had long before intermingled their noble seed with that of the natives. They were rare beauties, all of them, and his cousin Frederick John Paskways partook of the handsomeness that typified the males. Some years before, Winston had advanced John's career, brought him over to England and observed from a distance with satisfaction his education and training in the military.
Einstein still wished to fulminate, but Bohr interrupted him.
"I do not agree with you, Albert: We have all talked over this many times, and the Marshal must know that we are not in agreement. You fear that an uncontrolled rip or hole in the space-time continuum will threaten to unravel or blot out the universe as it expands. I say that the past only is at risk, and that we must accept the new future which an altered past gives to us."
Strassmann and Lise Meitner both nodded with the Marshal. But Einstein shook his hoary head emphatically, whilst Otto Hahn seemed undecided by his silence. Of the other scientists present, Winston observed a similar split between Einstein's fears, Niels Bohr's theory and Hahn's uncertainty.
The Marshal decided it was too late to make a decision.
"Well. Let us sleep on what we have heard. I will call another conference in the morning after breakfast."
Chapter Three
As Marshal Winston approached the door, he could hear the beautiful Andante of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. He stood for a long moment listening, his cigar forgotten between his lips, until a large ash broke off and fell upon his greatcoat-covered paunch. Cursing silently, the Marshal brushed off the ashes and then knocked upon the oak with the silver head of his walking stick. The violin music abruptly ceased. But no sound of movement from inside indicated that Einstein was coming to open up.
"Albert, it's me, open the door." Winston pitched his voice to a friendly level, his head cocked to one side listening.
For answer, the Andante resumed. Then it changed at once for the Allegretto non troppo: Einstein played it with a furious speed and anger.
Winston sighed and tried the handle. The door swung inward. He could see the little Jewish physicist from behind. Einstein faced the open window as he played and he ignored the entry of the Marshal. Winston closed the door and waited until his friend was finished. Einstein lowered the violin and stood looking out on the blackness of the Highlands night. The sky was patched with stars. The Aurora Borealis flickered faintly and limed his shaggy hairs. He seemed unaware of the frigid air leaking into the room from the window.
Winston waited, puffing patiently on his cigar.
At last, the shoulders of his friend drooped and he lowered his head. He shook it slowly, looking down at the floor or at nothing at all. Then he laid aside his violin on the bed and shut the window. Without looking at the Marshal, he went over to the fireplace and thrust the poker in until the coals flared up in a cheery little blaze. He stooped down and held out his hands.
Winston came to his side, but old age stiffness and obesity prevented him from crouching down beside him. He removed his gloves and held out his own pudgy fingers. Then he took the stogie from his mouth and tossed it into the fire. He lit another cigar with an expensive gold lighter.
Einstein winced slightly as the fresh smoke wreathed both their heads. Still, he said nothing and looked at nothing, save what he chose to see in the flames.
"Albert. What do you work for?" Winston spoke without removing the cigar. He turned his little, watery eyes toward the physicist.
The drooping mustachios hid Einstein's sad mouth. But nothing could hide the large and unhappy brown eyes. He looked as old as he felt.
Winston suppressed the feeling of compassion that stirred in his gut. Albert was a largely defeated man. His idealistic resistance to the Reich had played out to complete failure. Flight from his beloved homeland followed for the German Jew. The Gestapo could no longer get at the exiled physicist, and so they had trashed his family house in retaliation for Albert's outspoken defiance of German militarism. His politics and philosophy were out of step, but his knowledge was sought after still. Einstein's presence at Castle Augustus was a well-kept state secret. To the Nazis, the castle was merely the monastery it had been for generations. If they had any intimation at all that it was being used by their disaffected atomic scientists to further the cause of the free world, the Nazis would bomb Augustus to rubble.
Einstein spoke without looking away from the flames. His voice was tired.
"I do not know anymore. It seems that all my searching for answers is twisted into things I do not want. I seek for the answer to the riddle of the Unified Field, and I discover this instead. I know there is one master equation that governs the order of the universe on the atomic and subatomic level. I believe that I can discover it, if I but try patiently and live long enough. Now this dreadful discovery has captured mine and mine colleagues' fancy. It will not let us go. What any of them hope to do with it is beyond my comprehension. We are like little boys and girls, who have opened a fascinating Pandora's Box and cannot for our very lives discover what it is for. Great danger is contained therein. But will that stop us? Not in the least. We are insane, each and every one of us."
"Perhaps you are wrong," said Winston. "Perhaps Bohr and the others are right and you are wrong."
"It is a risk not worth taking to find out. We would be safer to use the Bomb."
"Are you advocating such a move?"
"Of course not. I only say this to shock you. I can tell that you do not feel the dangerous implications of opening even a tiny hole in the space-time continuum. Let me explain some things to you."
He twisted with a grimace to his full, diminutive height and reached for a chair. Winston dragged up a second chair and they faced each other and the fire at the same time.
"I wrote to you about the apple," Einstein continued. "But what I did not get across with my hasty words was the effect upon those of us in the room. I mentioned the thunderclap when the rent in the continuum shut again. But each of us felt another sensation, difficult to describe, but shared by all. When Strassmann engaged the electromagnetic energy field to open the continuum, I felt an immediate pulling deep inside of my being. Tiny as the hole was, and as briefly as we held it open, yet I felt drawn in my soul to the compressed space. Had it remained open longer, or had it been perhaps larger, I doubt very much that I would have remained in this time. When I or the others would finally have wound up we will never know. And whether dead or alive we will never know."
"You feel that there is a risk to life for the traveler?"
"We do not know. There is no evidence of any inimical effects - at our end. But what happens when the hole closes up? When the subject is cut off from the time in which he has lived? There may be unknown factors which bind us irrevocably to our own time. If the soul is bound here, and the body is taken away to another century, well, you can imagine what I am suggesting."
"I will consider all that you have said, my friend," said Winston. "But I hope that you also will consider the desperation of our plight. Defeat is certain. We cannot hold back the Wehrmacht. We can only make them bleed. I will not go down in history as a monster who used the Bomb. It would kill our people as well as the Nazis. The world would become a horror perhaps worse than the night of tyranny that will soon engulf us all."
"Then let it happen, and let God repair our freedom in the future," said Einstein.
"I cannot do that," said the Marshal. "You have given me an option. I choose to believe that God has given us this way to stop the endless night. All the lights in Europe have gone out, save here. We are running out of time. Only your Machine offers us the hope that time is ours. No men on earth have ever before had such an opportunity. I mean to do it. I hope that you will reconsider and support me. But if you cannot, then at least you will please stay out of my way."
Einstein turned his face to the fire, stoked it again, and then would neither look at Winston nor speak. The Marshal soon left him and went to bed.
He was awakened by his cousin Paskways before it was yet dawn.
"You were right, Sir," the young Commando said. "He tried to get to the Machine and wreck it. But Sergeant Allred and I stopped him."
"What did you do with him?" asked Winston as he sat up ponderously in the bed. As Paskways talked, he began to dress quickly.
"We took him back to his room and right now Sergeant Allred is standing guard in the passageway outside his door."
"You didn't rough him up, did you?"
"No Sir. He did not show fight when we came out of the shadows. He was caught in the act, and he gave up this when I demanded it." He held out a heavy sledge hammer.
"Did he say anything?"
"Not a word."
"Hmpf," said Winston. Albert had always been a voluble man. He loved to talk about everything under the sun. Even when his wife had died he had been able to drown his grief with endless talk. This silence spoke volumes of his distress. Winston suppressed a growing unease at his course of action. But he would not let Albert's fears deter him from his duty.
"I want you to post a double guard on the room where the Machine is. And when Sergeant Allred is relieved of his watch on Albert's door, you are to take his place."
Chapter Four
The Marshal reconvened the conference as he had promised. Noticeable by his absence was Albert Einstein. The other scientists looked at one another uneasily, wondering what it meant. None of them had heard anything of his attempted sabotage of the Machine in the night.
Winston laid their fears to rest at once.
"Professor Einstein is being kept in his room under guard. If any of you wish to, you may visit him at any time after this meeting. I had to place him under arrest to keep him from destroying the Unified Field Machine."
"Albert would never do that," said Lise Meitner.
"He already tried it last night," the Marshal said. Meitner looked shocked. "He tried to smash it with this." Winston threw down the sledge hammer on the table. "We stopped him before he got to it.
"Now, I want you each to tell me all that you feel about this strategy of mine. I mean to send Lieutenant Paskways back in time to before the Grand Armistice. Once there, he can bend all his energies to preventing the historical outcome. What I want to know from each of you are the risks and the unknown factors involved in embarking upon such a journey."
Bohr cleared his throat.
"Lord Winston, practically everything about opened holes in the space-time continuum are unknown factors. All we can be certain of is that they do indeed exist when we measure out the sequential splitting of the uranium atom within an alternating electromagnetic field. The frequency of the pulsations is critical, and must not deviate from an relationship with the value of the earth's static gravitational inertia. It is very hard to explain this without resorting to Professor Einstein's formulae."
"Do not bother," smiled the Marshal. "I would not understand you at all. What I want to learn from you worthies, is how to send Lieutenant Paskways where I want him. The mathematical intricacies I leave to your august body."
"We do not require Albert's involvement to work the Machine," said Lise Meitner. "But if any aberration should develop, we might not know what to do to correct it."
"He has coordinated our work on his formulae," said Strassmann. "None of us has full knowledge of the completed formula that he has used to program the Machine's computer."
"Is that dangerous?" asked the Marshal.
"Not particularly," said Strassmann. "Anytime you are playing with splitting the atom in sequence it is not something to take lightly. But the override on the Machine warns us of any taxing of the uranium core. Splitting atoms in sequence can be done relatively safely if you take proper precautions to avoid an uncontrolled chain-reaction."
"We will risk it," said Marshal Winston. "What I want to know is: Can you predict when Lieutenant Paskways will be when he stops?"
"If you are trying to pinpoint a year or even a period of time more precise than a decade, the answer is no," said Meitner.
"When the hole is opened, it is because of the splitting of the atoms under very precise conditions," added Bohr. "The gauging of the electromagnetic field is based upon Albert's theoretical formula alone. He believes that, based upon the affect which the radioactive and electromagnetic field have upon the quanta of full-spectrum light, he can predict how far back an object of a specific mass can expect to reach, through a hole of a specific size, kept open a specific time. But we do not know."
"Will further experiments reveal the truth of this?" asked Marshal Winston.
"Not really," admitted Bohr, and the others agreed. "You see, the problem is that once sent into the past, any object is lost to us in the present. It is a conundrum for which we have no answer."
"If you sent a person into the past," said Strassmann, "with a specific time targeted, and he wrote a message to us and placed it in a safe and prearranged location, then we could know now how accurately we can predict a target in the past. He would have let us know long before, you see." The German physicist smiled enigmatically.
"Then let us do so at once," said Marshal Winston. "Where would you suggest as a likely place for our traveler to deposit his message to us?"
The scientists looked at each other in silence.
"I see no difficulty with this idea," said the Marshal.
"Well, you see, we thought you understood already," said Lise Meitner. "Albert's little model, the one we used to send the apple: It was irreparably damaged during the operation. The Machine is merely a larger capacity device. But we expect the same one-shot use from it. After that, we would have to build another Machine to send someone else."
"I see," said the Marshal. "And how long did it take to build the Machine we now have?"
"Just over three years," said Strassmann softly.
Chapter Five
Winston was speechless the first time he laid eyes on the Machine.
The Unified Field Machine was enormous. It filled the ground level room. (Paskways and Allred had not had any difficulty finding a place to hide, when Marshal Winston had ordered them there to lay in wait for the disgruntled Einstein.) It comprised, to the ignorant eyes of Marshal Winston and Duke Montgomery, a massive boiler-shaped central core that reached nearly to the vaulted ceiling, and proceeding in and out from this was a plethora of pipes and conduits for wires that boggled the senses. All of this was directed through junction boxes to a huge computer console in an adjoining room. The noise of the relays that packed a third chamber behind the console was threatening to the delicacy of human hearing.
Behind the Machine lay a smaller room, sheathed in lead, and connected to the electromagnetic field capacitor through a short, lead-lined passageway. The scientists explained to the Marshal, that the lead lining helped contain the sizing of the hole in the space-time continuum; at least, they hoped so. During the apple experiment, the lead-lined box had had temperature, ohm meter, radium level and other gauges attached to it, and the collected data from the brief experiment had shown that the lead lining had indeed soaked up a slightly greater amount of electromagnetic energy and heat than the outside of the box. The levels had not been inimical to life.
The Marshal asked:
"How large was the model?"
"About the size of a Bentley, Lord Winston," smiled Strassmann.
"The computer, of course, was the same one," added Bohr.
"I see no reason to delay this any further," said the Marshal. "You have graphically shown me that building a second machine is out of the question. We have no time. So tell, how closely can you put Lieutenant Paskways down prior to 1864?"
Lise Meitner said:
"We will use Albert's theoretical formula. It is put into the computer. We do not even require an adjustment of the previous settings." She smiled ironically.
"What do you mean by that?" asked the Marshal.
"Coincidentally, Lord Winston, the target window Albert chose to send the apple was from 1849 to 1859."
"How odd," said Winston.
"It was a significant time in the life of his parents, we gather," said Meitner.
The Marshal turned to Sergeant Allred. "Go and relieve Paskways and tell him to report here to me at once."
After the Commando had arrived, Winston said:
"Get your gear together, my boy. The fateful moment has arrived. Are you sure you want to do this?"
"Yes, Sir. We have been all through that. My mind is made up."
"Very well. I accept your reasons, and admire your sense of sacrifice and your bravery. You are about to make history, John, but by the nature of this voyage, it seems that you might never get credit for being the first man to ever leave his own time and reappear in another."
"Recognition is of no importance to me, Sir. I'll do all that you have instructed me to do. And I will not count the cost to myself. As I have already explained, I am the perfect man for the job."
"True, my boy, very true. Well, get your kit and meet us back here as soon as you are ready."
Winston looked at the empty doorway for a long moment after Paskways had gone. He puffed absently on a cheroot and seemed not to notice the flurry of activity amongst the scientists as they readied the Machine and the computer. Paskways' wife and boy had both died earlier that year in the Blitz on London. It did not help his frame of mind that Winston had later ordered all the women and children out of the metropolis to relative safety in the distant countryside away from the bombing.
Lieutenant Paskways came with his equipage and deposited it in the lead-lined room, where he and it were meticulously weighed in. The duffle bag, pack, skis, parka and tent all bespoke of preparation to survive for a lengthy period of time in the wilderness. For weapons he brought an Enfield revolver and 200 rounds, his father's Lee-Enfield rifle from the Great War and 200 rounds, a Sten Mk 2 submachine gun with another 500 rounds, and his indispensable dagger. A number of frag grenades completed his armory. Most of it was stowed away out of sight in the massive duffle. The Enfield he wore under his short coat in a shoulder holster, and the dagger rode in a parallel belt sheath over the small of his back. Paskways did not wear the field uniform of the Commandos. Instead, in anticipation, he wore the hunting kit of a Scottish Highlander of the 19th century. Inside the duffle he had a change of clothes, which included more urbanized civilian wear.
When the Machine was ready, parts of it were emitting the frigid vapor of carbon dioxide cooling, while steam from high heat vented to the outside air through large fan equipped pipes. The racket of relays from the computer's memory banks was the preeminent sound, even in the room where the Machine-proper stood. For all its imposing size and complexity, it was a curiously silent collection of devices.
Paskways walked back to the lead-lined chamber, and just before he entered, Winston took him by the arm.
"I am sure that my worry far exceeds your own, John. If I were a younger man, I would hazard the trip myself. Go with God." His little, rheumy eyes were tender and sympathetic.
Lieutenant Frederick John Paskways managed a tiny smile and accepted his cousin's handshake wordlessly. Then he went inside and Niels Bohr pushed the heavy door and shut it fast. He directed Marshal Winston to follow him to the computer room. They shut another lead-lined door that held a window. But Winston and the Duke were told that they must stay back.
A mist soon coated the glass from inside the room where the Machine whirred away.
Lise Meitner and another physicist named Infeld were busy flipping switches and turning knobs on the console. Indicator needles on gauges told them what to do, and it was all a complete humbug to the Marshal. He felt like a fifth wheel. The scientists called out to one another in their esoteric jargon, the vocabulary of a closed cell. Bohr read loudly from the computer tape as it clicked slowly out of the racketing, enormous bank of relays. Strassmann and Hahn read from a cluster of gauges the mysterious progress of the Machine. They occasionally shouted out values. Meitner and Infeld made constant adjustments. Everyone else stood by, biting lips and smiling at each other when their eyes met.
A terrible and exciting feeling pervaded Winston's guts. It swept rapidly over his whole body. Dimly he heard others exclaiming over their own ecstatic experience. It was like being drawn through an enfolding tube of light that the eyes could not perceive, and at the same time every nerve ending sparkled with it. Orgasm paled beside it, yet it bore no comparison as to similarity of feeling. At once, it passed away, as though it had fled beyond where Winston stood.
Finally, Meitner and Infeld sat back and looked at each other. Simultaneously, they wiped sweat off their faces and smiled nervously.
"Well, let us go and see," said Lise Meitner. She stood up, and as she reached the intervening door Strassmann swung it aside. A vast steam met them and rolled into the console room along the ceiling. Strassmann followed Lise, "Monty" and Marshal Winston into the Machine room.
Meitner absently waved her hand at the mist as she advanced hesitantly through it toward the lead-lined room. Winston followed immediately behind her.
She let him spin the wheel on the door and swing it wide.
Paskways and all his kit were gone.
Lise Meitner looked at the Marshal and Strassmann and smiled with pleasure. Then her eyes suddenly widened with horror and before she could even scream Winston whirled about.
A dreadful cry preceded a meaty 'chunk' and Strassmann's head rolled from his shoulders. Blood fountained up and drenched the steaming side of the Machine. As his body dropped, Winston saw a mighty axe raised upwards again in the mist. It glittered in the hands of a bearded berserker from some indefinable epoch. He shouted his unintelligible war cry again. Meitner screamed.
Winston dropped back with an alacrity which belied his age and corpulence. He dragged Lise with him and "Monty" hove the door closed.
The dripping war axe fetched against the jamb, narrowly missing the gap as the door shut.
Winston heard the berserker whirl and run off. "Odin!" was all they could make out from his babbled war cry.
"My Got!" Lise said. "The hole, it is a rent in the space-time continuum. Something has gone wrong. We must get Albert down here at once."
Duke Montgomery tried the door gingerly. The berserker was indeed gone. Screams echoed from outside. Gunfire was answered by groans and the sounds of struggle.
"Monty" ran with his pistol into the passageway and disappeared. Keeping ahead of Lise, Winston carefully advanced toward the console room. Another headless corpse dumped its bloody ooze across the floor. The door to the relay room was shut still. Whether others had retreated there Winston did not bother to find out.
"Go inside there," he said to Lise Meitner, pointing to the relay room. "Lock the door and wait until we have settled with things out here. I'll go and get Doctor Einstein."
She obeyed, and he turned for the passageway once she was safely inside.
The passageway was like a scene from Beowulf. When Grendel had entered the Danish king's hall and slain his men, the fiend had left such a wreckage behind as Winston saw. Pieces of scientist lay strewn about, and ahead a melee was going on between members of the garrison and more of the berserkers. In the close confines of the passageway, the combat between broadaxes and small arms was very even.
Winston paused only to pick up the pistol from a dead soldier. Then he dashed up the passageway the opposite direction as quickly as his age and adrenalin-laced bulk allowed.
He went up the winding stairs of the castle breathing heavily. The forgotten cigar waggled between his lips. On his face he wore an unconscious smile of fear and pure delight.
At the top of the stairs he paused to look carefully into the passageway. The noise of combat echoed up from the rooms below, but here all was quiet. He advanced toward Einstein's room. Rounding the corner he was gratified to see Sergeant Allred still at his post outside the door, despite the cries of alarm.
"Thank God, Sir," Allred breathed. His own pistol was out. "What in heaven's name is going on down there?"
"You will never believe it, Sergeant. In the morning, you will never believe it. But there's no time now. Get Albert out here."
His commanding officer's smile both reassured and unsettled Allred. He opened the door and immediately Einstein was out in the passageway. His brown eyes were no longer sad. They fairly spit fire at the Marshal.
"See! I told you! Would you not listen? Fools! All of you, fools! Come, we haven't a moment to lose. If we do not close the rent Got alone knows what will happen."
Without looking to see if they followed him or not, Einstein ran for the stairs. Sergeant Allred kept pace with him, but Winston puffed with a purple face far to the rear.
Below, the passageway was quiet. The battle had moved on. Distant sounds of it emerged from the depths of the castle.
Einstein arrived at the Machine room and went at once past it to the console. He scanned all the gauges and barely noticed the corpse of his colleague enough to wrinkle his large nose. He stepped in the congealing blood without seeming to care. All his attention was on the console and its message.
"The Machine is dead," he said to himself. "But the hole is there still. Why did they not see it?"
Sergeant Allred stood watch at the door and let the little Jewish physicist rant as he worked. Einstein threw switches and whirled dials. He went to the computer and stood impatiently as the tape emerged. He muttered to himself in German all the while.
Winston ducked his head inside with a sheepish smile.
"Winston, you fool, you did not listen to me!" shouted Einstein. "Now we are really in for it. I do not think I can stop this."
"Paskways is gone," the Marshal said. "You sent him back to the 19th century."
"You think so, do you?" said Einstein. He talked as he worked. "And what do you think this oh-so-large rent in the space-time continuum means? Do you think Paskways is going where the instruments said he was going? No, no, no!"
"Where is he then?"
"Got alone knows that, my foolish fat friend. Got alone knows."
Winston went away and let Einstein work in private. He told Sergeant Allred to keep guard over the genius and make certain that nothing happened to him.
Then the Marshal of Britain went toward the place where he had last heard fighting.
The old great hall had been the scene of the final struggle. Vikings lay everywhere. Soldiers of the garrison were bandaging comrades' wounds and shaking their heads in unbelief. One of them whistled when he saw the commander-in-chief enter the chamber. Duke Montgomery shook his head and his mustache bristled like that of a terrier. He managed a wry smile.
"Send a detachment outside to scout the neighborhood," Winston said to Castellan Monteith. It was done.
While they waited for the return of the men, Winston sat down beside the great fireplace. He looked around at the carnage and then he started to laugh. He brushed ashes from his pants and tossed the cheroot into the blaze. He lit another cigar. Still he laughed.
"Monty" joined him.
The patrol returned, the worst for wear.
"Things are balmy out there, Sir," reported the sergeant to Marshal Winston. "We saw more of these buggers," (pointing to the Viking bodies) "and then there are ancient Picts fighting with them outside, or I'm a Kraut. And down by the loch, we saw, I don't know what we saw, but it doesn't hail from anywhere I know of; some huge snake-like creature with legs. It slithered off into the water and disappeared. On our way back up here, we were jumped by a patrol of Roman legionaries, I swear it! Real segmented armor and all. We had to shoot them all down. The silly sods kept shouting at us and throwing their damned spears. We ordered them from the road but they wouldn't listen."
"Send out most of the boys," said Marshal Winston to the Castellan. "Take out the flame throwers, arm up with the heavy machine guns and grenades. Kill everything that does not look like it belongs to the real world. If in question, bring prisoners back here and we can decide what to do with them."
While the garrison went out with "Monty" and Castellan Monteith, and scoured the neighborhood for denizens from the rent, Winston returned to the Machine room.
Einstein was still hard at it.
"I do not know. I do not know," he kept saying. "The Machine is ruined, yes. But the sending chamber still is the center of the widening rent. It should be way out upon the loch by now. It is getting bigger, but it is also getting slower. Yes, yes! I agree, you should stop all denizens. Kill what looks dangerous, it is wartime after all. Now, leave me in peace and quiet and I will do what I can."
Winston went up to the battlements and peered through binoculars at the surrounding heights and the bottom of the vale where Loch Ness rounded into view. His chilled breath mingled with the smoke from his neglected cheroot. He thought he espied a strange movement out there upon the water and looked through the glasses. A rippling hinted at some vast bulk swimming just below the black-green surface, then it went down and was lost. A shape in the sky caught his attention. He gasped with delight. A pterodactyl (or a dragon?!) flapped crazily on the Highlands wind. He watched it through the glasses until it too was lost to view.
"This is great, just grand," said Winston to himself. "I don't care what Albert has to say about it, this is grand stuff. I want more..."
He lowered the binoculars and scanned hungrily for signs of life. He heard the intermittent sounds of gunfire and once or twice he fancied he heard exploding grenades. A little running fight hove into view, between another detachment of Roman auxiliaries and Pictish warriors. But as they spied the frowning castle, both parties stopped in their tracks. Winston could clearly hear the alien voices raised in amazement and fear. The Romans, who had been pursued by the much larger band of Picts, took advantage of the moment to form up and move off to safety. Where they thought they were going, Winston had no idea, but he would have loved seeing their faces once they got there. The Picts scattered, calling upon their ancient deities for deliverance.
At dusk, the garrison returned to Castle Augustus. That night, at supper in the great hall, the stories were fantastic and fear was largely dispelled by then by the success of their arms.
"I figure that in the morning, we can go out and mop up what's left," said the Duke.
"If Albert closes off the hole," said Marshal Winston. "He and all the other scientists are laboring with modified formulae to make use of the dregs of the Unified Field Machine." He did not seem particularly worried whether they succeeded or not.
That night, Winston went to bed content. Something utterly inexplicable and wonderful had been born. He did not care what the outcome was to be. This day had been filled with the kinds of things he had daydreamed as a boy, lonely and sickly, all those many long, long, days. To have it come full-blown into reality was a gift from God. It made him truly believe in God. Only God could come up with something like Einstein's Unified Field. God must be shaking his head and laughing at what they had done. Winston was chuckling himself as he drifted off to sleep.
Down in the Machine room, Einstein, Meitner, Bohr, Hahn and a few other surviving scientists labored with the computer far into the night to close off the rent in the space-time continuum.
"Finally, according to the instruments, it is done," said Einstein. "I hope they do not lie. Now, let us go off to bed."
As he lay back under the covers, Albert Einstein could not sleep. He wondered if they had truly closed off the rent. It was not something he would admit to the others, but he thought the Machine incapable of what they had done. It was too crippled by the implosion. Yet the hole, the rent, was sealed up once again. Why? How? There had been no thunderclap as before. It was as though the hole had slowly sealed off, with a whisper. Nothing but vain formulae flittered about inside his mind for answer. The closure was a fact, but he was lost to explain how it had happened.
Chapter Six
Lieutenant Paskways stood in the lead-lined room and waited for he knew not what. The physicists had not been able to offer a single piece of information about how he should feel when the Machine would open the hole in the room where they had shut him away. Niels Bohr had merely smiled enigmatically and said: "You will see."
When it came, Paskways was unprepared for the pleasurable softness of the lead walls. In a trice, however, the sensation of enfolding was gone and he found himself standing beside his undisturbed gear on the hillside of a fine summer night.
Something firm smacked him on top of the head, making him jump. But there was nothing and no one around to account for the slight bruise on his pate. He rubbed it, as he looked around at the verdant, grassy slopes, rippling softly in the breeze. The air breathed of pine and peat. He was low in the vale where the castle would later stand, but not far off, and somewhat lower, he could descry the regular outline of a few thatched rooftops. The wind-born clank of a sheep's bell sounded clearly though faint. Peering intently, he could just make out the dim grey murk of a flock of sheep grazing further up the mountainside.