All Clear (17 page)

“Not if you’re an American,” Polly said. “The Americans didn’t come to Bletchley Park till February of ’42. Do you think you could pass as an Englishman?”

“I
am
an Englishman. I had an American L-and-A, remember? But how am I supposed to pull off working there? It took clearance to get into Bletchley Park. I’d never be able to pass the background check.”

“Gerald did,” Eileen said.

“With carefully forged school records and letters of recommendation. That’s probably what his recon trip was about, planting documents that could stand up to Bletchley Park’s background check. My history wouldn’t.”

“You needn’t actually work there,” Polly said. “And by the way, it’s BP or the Park, not Bletchley Park. And not Bletchley—Bletchley’s the town. Bletchley Park is the Victorian manor outside of town where the decoding was done. Only a few codebreakers lived on the estate. Everyone else was billeted in Bletchley or the surrounding villages.”

“Then why do I have to pretend at all? Why can’t I go as a reporter and talk to them in the town, say I’m working on a story?”

“Because they’ve all been forbidden to talk to anyone. They’ve all signed the Official Secrets Act. They can get the death penalty if they talk. Besides, you’d be hauled in by the authorities
instantly
if they heard you were planning to write about Bletchley Park.”

“I could say I was doing a story on something else,” he said, but Polly was shaking her head.

“No, people will be much more likely to talk to you if they think you’re one of them. If they ask what your job is, which they won’t, you can say you work for the War Office. That was the official cover for intelligence work.”

“How can you be so sure they won’t ask me what my job is?”

“No one was allowed to discuss what they were doing. People who worked in one hut didn’t even know the names of the people in the other huts.”

Then how am I supposed to find out if Gerald’s there
? he wondered. “What if Gerald’s one of the people living on the estate?” he asked.

“He won’t be. That was mostly the top codebreakers, like Dilly Knox
and Alan Turing. Turing was Ultra’s computer genius.” She was looking critically at him. “You haven’t any other clothes, have you?”

“No, these are the best I’ve got. Aren’t they good enough?”

“They’re too good. If you’re going as a cryptanalyst—that’s what they called the codebreakers—you’ll have to look the part. Don’t worry, we’ll find you something.”

The “something” turned out to be a secondhand tweed jacket with patches at the elbows, a scruffy-looking wool vest, and a tie with a large grease spot on it. “Are you sure this is what they wore, Polly?” Mike asked doubtfully.

“Positive, although the waistcoat may be too nice.”

“Too
nice
?”

“These are physicists and mathematicians we’re dealing with. Can you play chess?”

“No. Why?”

“There weren’t enough cryptanalysts in England at the beginning of the war, so they recruited anyone they thought might be good at decoding—statisticians and Egyptologists and chess players. If you could play, it would make a good conversational opening.”

“I could teach you,” Eileen said.

“There isn’t time,” he said. “I want to leave tomorrow.”

“No, you need to wait till Sunday,” Polly said. “It’ll be less conspicuous. Lots of BPers will be coming back from the weekend then. And I need to prep you.”

She did, telling him everything she knew about Bletchley Park and Ultra and the principal players in such detail that he wondered if she was still worried about his altering events, too, in spite of his reassurances. She even told him what the various codebreakers looked like.

So I can keep out of their way
, he thought. Which wasn’t a bad idea, just in case. He memorized the names she gave him: Menzies, Welchman, Angus Wilson, Alan Turing.

“Turing’s blonde, medium height, and stammers. Dilly Knox—he heads up the main team of cryptanalysts—is tall and thin and smokes a pipe. And he’s absent-minded. He’s been known to fill his pipe with bits of his sandwich. Oh, and he’s usually surrounded by young women. Dilly’s girls.”

“Dilly’s girls?”

“Yes. They played a vital role in the decoding. They searched through millions of lines of code, looking for patterns and anomalies.”

“How do you know all this?” he asked. A horrible thought struck
him. “You didn’t do an assignment at Bletchley Park, did you?” If she had, and she had a deadline …

“No,” she said. “I considered it, but after I’d researched it, I decided the Blitz might be more exciting.”

Not if historians can alter the course of the war
, he thought.

On Sunday Polly and Eileen went to the station to see him off and to give him last-minute instructions. “The Park’s in walking distance of town,” Polly said, “but I don’t know in which direction, and asking might look suspicious.”

“I won’t ask,” he assured her. “I’ll find a likely prospect and follow him when I get off the train.”

“And I’m not sure the project’s called Ultra at this point. ‘Ultra’ stood for ultra-top-secret, the most classified category of military secrets, and I think in 1940 the project may just have been called Enigma, and not—”

“It doesn’t matter what it’s called. I have no intention of mentioning Enigma
or
Ultra. I intend to find Gerald and get out.”

“There’s the boarding call,” Eileen said. “Perhaps you’ll be in the same compartment with someone who works there, and you can ask
them
if they know Gerald and how you can get in touch with him, and you won’t need to go to Bletchley at all.”

Jesus, he hadn’t thought about running into them on the train. “What does Turing look like again?” he asked Polly.

“Blonde hair. Stammer.”

“And Dilly Knox is tall and smokes a pipe.”

“And has a limp like yours. And Alan Ross has a long red beard, and when it’s cold wears a blue snood over it.”

“Over his
beard
?” Mike said. “And you’re worried about
me
being conspicuous? They sound crazy.”

“Eccentric,” Polly said. “Oh, and Ross has a little boy, and when he traveled, he doped him with laudanum—”

“Laudanum,” Eileen said wistfully, and when they looked at her, she explained, “Sorry, I was just thinking how useful laudanum would have been on that journey to London with the Hodbins.”

“Yes, well, I don’t know if Ross’s son was a terror or not,” Polly said, “but he gave him laudanum and stowed him in the luggage rack, so if you see a little boy sleeping up in the luggage rack, you’ll know that’s the compartment Alan Ross is in.”

And I can make sure I keep out of it
. “Look, I’d better get out to the platform,” he said.

“Wait,” Eileen said, grabbing his sleeve. “What happened?”

“What happened?” he repeated blankly.

“To Ross’s son?” Polly asked.

“No, to Shackleton. When he left his crew on the island and went off to get help. Did he come back?”

“Yes, with a ship, to take them all home. He didn’t lose a single man.”

“Good,” she said, and smiled at him.

“Ring us as soon as you get there,” Polly said.

“I will,” he promised, thinking,
If I can get there
. Just because he’d gone to one divergence point didn’t mean the continuum would let him near another, especially one where a single person could mess up everything. His train could be blown up en route. Or the train might be too crowded to get on, which looked like it was going to be the case.

It was packed to the gills, but he managed to squeeze on, and on the train from Oxford, he was even able to find a seat—taking care to pick a compartment that didn’t have any blonde stammerers, tall pipe-smokers, or doped-up children in it. He picked one occupied by five soldiers and two elderly ladies. He slung his bag up onto the luggage rack—which only held brown-paper-wrapped packages, no children—and sat down in the single empty seat.

He was almost instantly sorry. As soon as the train pulled out of the station, the soldiers left the compartment to go have a smoke, and a bald, spectacled man dressed in tweeds, with a knitted vest even rattier and more full of holes than the one Eileen had found for Mike came in and sat down between Mike and the door, stretching out his legs so it was impossible for Mike to get out of the compartment without asking him to move, and he didn’t want to have any contact with him.

The man was too bald to be Turing and too short to be Knox, and he didn’t have a red beard, but he definitely worked at the Park. The moment the train left the station, he pulled out a book titled
Principia Mathematica
and buried his nose in it, ignoring Mike and the two ladies, who were cheerfully discussing various physical ailments.

“The pain begins in my foot and works its way all up my spine,” the one in the brown hat said. “Dr. Granholme says it’s sciatica.”

“I have a dull throbbing pain in my knees,” the other one, in a black hat with a bird on it, said. “Dr. Evers prescribed a course of nutrient baths, but it didn’t do a bit of good.”

“You should go to Dr. Sheppard in Leighton Buzzard. My friend Olive Bates says he’s wonderful with knees. I didn’t tell you, her son was called up last week. Poor Olive, she’s frightfully worried he’ll be sent somewhere dangerous.”

Like Bletchley Park
, Mike thought, pretending to look out the window. BP was an exponentially more dangerous divergence point than Dunkirk because it involved a secret, and secrets were the most fragile and easily altered divergence points in the continuum. Because even though it took the combined efforts of many people to
keep
a secret, a single person, a single careless remark, could reveal it. Like a delayed-action bomb, which the slightest touch could set off.

All he had to do was ask the wrong question. Or too many questions. Or blow his cover. That meant he’d have to watch every word. His American L-and-A still hadn’t worn off, so he’d have to remember to keep his vowels clipped and to use the English terms for things. No “flashlights” or “elevators,” though he doubted Bletchley was a big-enough town to have elevators—correction, lifts—and it—

The train jerked to a stop. Black Hat with Bird looked nervously out the window. “Oh, dear, I do hope it’s not an air raid. I’d hoped to arrive in Bletchley before dark.”

And I’d hoped to arrive in Bletchley, period
, Mike thought, hoping a passing troop train had delayed them, but they weren’t on a siding, and after a minute the guard came through apologizing for the delay and asking them to pull down the blackout blinds.

“Is it a raid?” Brown Hat asked.

“Yes, madam,” the conductor said, “but I’m certain there’s no danger.”

Except from me
, Mike thought, listening for approaching planes, but nothing happened. They didn’t start up again either, and as they sat there, everything Polly’d told him about how she’d influenced the shopgirl Marjorie came back to him, and he found himself thinking about Dunkirk and all the other things he’d done besides unfouling that propeller, from tossing those gas cans overboard to hauling the dog up over the side. He’d lost his life jacket in the water. Had it floated off somewhere to entangle itself in some other propeller? And what about the body? And now here he was going to a place where a single mistake, a single word, could—

The train jerked sharply and started moving again, and the ladies went back to discussing their ailments. “All autumn I’ve had a dreadful pain in my heel,” Brown Hat said. “A friend of mine told me about Dr. Pritchard’s manipulation treatments, so I’m going to his clinic in Newport Pagnell.”

“Newport Pagnell?” Black Hat with Bird cried. “Why, that’s quite near Bletchley! You must come for tea one day. Are you getting off there, too?”

“Yes. Dr. Pritchard’s sending a car.”

Good, that meant he wouldn’t have to ask the spectacled man which station was Bletchley.

“If Dr. Pritchard’s treatment isn’t satisfactory,” Black Hat with Bird went on, “you must go to Dr. Childers in St. John’s Wood.”

St. John’s Wood. The lab had had a permanent drop there in the early days of time travel, before they’d figured out how to set up remotes. He wondered if Polly or Eileen knew where it was. When their drops malfunctioned, the lab might have reopened it to use as an alternative. He would have to tell Eileen and Polly that when he called them—correction, rang them up—to tell them he’d arrived safely.

If they ever got there. He had to sit through a seemingly endless discussion of bunions, rheumatism, lumbago, and palpitations before Black Hat with Bird said, “Oh, good, we’re coming into Bletchley,” and both ladies began collecting their things. The man continued reading even when they pulled in to the station, and Mike wondered if he’d been wrong about him being one of Bletchley Park’s cryptanalysts. But the second the train stopped, the man clapped his book shut and, without so much as a glance at any of them, was out the door and walking rapidly along the platform toward the station. Mike stood up, intending to follow him, but the ladies asked him to help them take their packages down from the overhead rack, and by the time Mike did, the man had vanished.

But there were plenty of people still in the station and outside—cycling and walking away from the station—whom he could follow. As soon as he found a phone. He’d promised Polly he’d call to tell her he’d got there okay. He only hoped it didn’t take forever to put the call through.

The phone booth—correction, box—wasn’t occupied, and the operator put the call through fairly quickly, but Mrs. Rickett answered and, when he asked for Polly, said sourly, “I don’t know if she’s here,” and when he asked her to go check, gave a put-upon sigh and went off for so long he had to put more coins in.

When Polly finally answered, he said, “I’ve got to make this quick.” The stuff about St. John’s Wood could wait till next time. “I got here all right.”

“Have you found a room? Or Gerald?”

“Not yet for either one. I just got off the train. I’ll call you as soon as I know where I’m staying,” he said, then hung up and hurried out into the station, but it had already emptied out, and when he went outside into the gathering dusk, there was no one in sight.