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ration.txt
Anna flipped over some pages to find another sheet. "Let me see. No, they're
not scheduled yet. The primaries are in Load Five with Ferracini and Cassidy.
They should be somewhere between
Indianapolis and here by now."
"Then the secondaries must still be at Albuquerque, yes? When are they due --
with Major
Warren and Sergeant Ryan in Load Six?"
"Yes, that's correct."
"Fine. In that case we'd better -- " A rasping sound from the ancient
telephone hanging on a pillar nearby interrupted. "Excuse me." Greene picked
his way between parts and boxes to answer it. "Yes, Gordon?" The call had to
be from Gordon Selby, the only other person in the building at that moment,
who was sorting out documents in the front office. Selby was one of
Greene's scientific group. He was also the mission's engineering foreman and
would be supervising the military personnel during assembly of the gate. As
well as providing the security guard, the members of the military contingent
had all undergone intensive technical training in order to assist.
"Oh?...Oh really?" Greene said into the phone. He was beginning to sound
excited. "Does it sound like good news, Gordon? Very well, what does it say?"
While Greene listened, Anna returned her attention to laying out the contents
of another crate. She had the feeling that Greene was more concerned about the
discrepancy than he tried to sound. If he could explain what had gone wrong,
why didn't he? If he couldn't, how could he be sure of anything?
She looked up inquiringly as Greene replaced the receiver with a jubilant
flourish.
"Gordon took a telegram up front a few minutes ago," he announced. "From Claud
in London. It sounds as if everything's going as planned. They're meeting
Churchill and three of his colleagues for lunch at the Dorchester on
Wednesday!"
CHAPTER 4
THIS WAS NOT WINSLADE'S first visit to London. It was, in a somewhat strange
manner of speaking, his second in less than a year. In the Proteus world, he
had come to the British capital in August 1938, as a member of a U.S.
intelligence-gathering tour of several European countries, sent to evaluate
information being brought by fugitive scientists from the totalitarian
dictatorships. Now, due to the extraordinary circumstances of the Proteus
mission, he was back again, ten months later and thirty-seven years older.
He had also visited London in the years following Britain's ignominious
surrender on the first day of 1941. Until 1960, he had been involved in
espionage activities camouflaged by various
U.S. diplomatic missions and embassy appointments. In that year, Germany's
formal relations with the West were virtually ended when Heydrich, after
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engineering Borman's assassination and forcing
Hitler to retire at seventy-one on the grounds of diminishing mental
faculties, came to power as the new F?hrer. Winslade had thereafter made
several covert trips in connection with the work that eventually culminated in
Proteus.
Those later visits, he had come to realize since his arrival from America with
the King group, had clouded his memories. He had remembered a London of
drabness, disillusionment, and defeat, with a Reich Governor installed at
Buckingham Palace, the swastika flying above its roof, and black-uniformed SS
sentries at its gates. He had remembered jackboots crashing in mockery on old
cobbled streets before the halls in which the Mother of Parliaments had been
born. He had remembered curfews, midnight arrests, and streets of boarded-up
shops. He had seen stooped, sunken-
faced women, whose menfolk had been taken to provide forced labor in the
conquered lands of
Russia, hauling handcarts and mending roads, while their ragged children
fought over spillings from garbage trucks. He had watched the nation's wealth
being carried away to swell the Reichsbank coffers, and its art treasures
being looted for the greater glorification of the Fatherland or for the
embellishment of Goering's show palace at Karinhall, near Berlin. He had
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