“So what was the half measure?” Dryden said.
“Sitting back and watching. Watching the world, and watching new communication technologies emerge naturally, over the decades. Scrutinizing the details, seeing if some new field of work started to look oddly familiar—along the lines of those old German tech notes. I’ve always thought it was a smart approach. Whether the Germans back then just made a shot in the dark, or even if they had some equivalent of a Nikola Tesla, way ahead of his time, it stood to reason someone else would eventually discover the same technology again. We figured by watching closely enough, we might actually see it coming. Some project at a place like MIT or Caltech might be stumbling in the right direction and not even realize it … but we would. For that matter, we could give them a little push now and then, this way or that way, based on the notes from 1942. Like that kids’ game, warmer or colder, only they wouldn’t know they were playing it. That’s how I ended up at Bayliss Labs. Their work with neutrinos, starting a few years back … the devices they were building … it was uncanny how well they matched those old notes. They were on the right track without knowing it. Once I became head of the company, I was able to give them a few nudges. Educated guesses that were more educated than I let on. Like I said, the end result wasn’t a fluke. Not just a fluke, anyway.”
“So the military knows what Bayliss created,” Marnie said. “If they sent you to oversee it—”
Whitcomb shook his head. “They sent me to try. I never told them I succeeded. When the damn thing finally worked, my reaction was genuine. It scared the hell out of me. I could see then how dangerous it could be, and what people would do to get control of it. The approach Claire told you about—my putting together a list of powerful people I trusted—that was all I could think of. At the time, I wasn’t seeing it in terms of destroying the thing, disinventing it. I just wanted to get it into safe hands. I thought that was possible, then. I don’t anymore. This technology needs to disappear. If we’re lucky, it’ll be another half a century before someone else invents it. Maybe the world will be readier for it by then.”
He said the last part like he didn’t put much stock in it. He started to say more, but Dryden cut him off.
“Wait a second. The machine your father found, in 1942 … how did it hear something more than twenty years in the future? Are you saying the Germans had a system like the Group has today? How could they? It takes computers, search engines—”
Whitcomb shook his head again. “If you want to control what you hear in the future, then you need search engines. But to just hear the distant future, a pretty crude feedback loop between two of these machines could be rigged up. That’s what the Germans had. It would have been primitive, compared to what we’re up against now.”
“Let’s get to that part,” Marnie said. “The Group. Curtis said in his letter that you know something about them.”
Whitcomb’s eyes went past the fire pit to the machine in its plastic case.
“I’ve known about them for years,” he said. “In a way, they’re the original owners of this technology.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“There was another side to the work my father did,” Whitcomb said, “and that I later did. It wasn’t just about trying to re-create these machines. There was all that paranoia I mentioned. The fear that some other government would build one of these things, if it were possible. We wondered if anyone in Germany remembered this research. If they’d shared it with others. We did a lot of snooping to find out—human intel, eavesdropping, anything we could manage. Over the years we picked up a few crumbs. We ended up pretty certain nobody else in the world knew how to build one of these. But we also learned there were people just like us out there: people who knew there had been a working model once and wanted to reinvent it.”
“Were they from the original project?” Dryden said.
“Not really. I don’t believe any of the initial researchers survived the war—but some of their knowledge did. As far as we could piece it together, we think there were detailed project files kept somewhere in Berlin, and in the last days before the city fell, somebody who understood the value of those files got them out of there. Out of harm’s way and into a hiding place. We think it was a German soldier, probably someone who’d done security for the project along the way. Then at some point in the postwar, he took that information to people who could make use of it. His own idea of safe hands to put it in, I suppose.”
“What kind of hands?” Marnie said.