Order of the Black Sun Box Set 4

by Preston William Child

  “We brought you some food, David,” Maria said. As usual, Sigrun said nothing. Her identical resemblance to Nina Gould was uncanny.

  “Thank you,” he grunted weakly, “so much.”

  They slipped the amply stocked trays through the narrow rectangle in the gate and he ripped through the meal like an animal.

  “Not too fast,” Sigrun said firmly. “You will die if your blood sugar rises too rapidly.”

  “David, we saw you basking in brilliant light,” Maria told him in awe. Her eyes were filled with devotion and admiration, but Sigrun narrowed her eyes and smiled, “We know what you are now, what your essence is made of.” She smiled kindly and caressed his face through the bars. “We welcome you to the Vril Society.”

  22

  “Are you seriously so selfish, Lydia?” Nina sneered right after the connection ceased. Sam held her by her arm to perturb her movement, keeping her from attacking Lydia.

  “She is in a wheelchair, Nina!” he reminded her, but it had no effect on Nina’s intent.

  “I don’t care if she is a fucking headless paraplegic, Sam,” she hissed at him. “Her handicap does not give her the right to treat her friends like bait, like…like…” she caught her breath.

  “Nina, he agreed of his own free will to do this for me,” Lydia explained. Sam was surprised at how unusually composed she was, but it was hard to tell if her docility came from contrition or from control.

  “I get that,” Nina said, “but now he is in trouble and instead of allowing him to come back immediately you still have the audacity to send him on errands! From now on my task here is suspended. I am not advising you on any more details of the French massacres so that you can play remote recon with a friend of mine!”

  “Listen, ladies, it is no use fighting over this. I propose we keep calm. We sit down like civilized professionals and we consider the factors before we decide what to do the next time he makes contact,” Sam suggested.

  “He could be dead by then,” Nina retorted. “You heard him. He is in hell, he is hungry. God knows what else is happening to him that he just doesn’t have time to tell us about.”

  Lydia sat quietly with her head bowed, contemplating the Tesla Experiment. It had come to the point where she had to decide what it was worth to her and if Purdue’s life was truly of less importance than her glory. Even if she could not prove that Tesla’s Teleforce weapon was a military marvel that could decimate the offensive forces of any invasion, she would still have proven that portals could safely transport humans between different spacetime fields.

  “Perhaps that would be enough glory,” she mumbled, spilling the sentence out loud to see how if it sounded acceptable to her ego.

  “What would be enough glory?” Nina asked.

  “To just have sent a man back in time, captured on film this time,” she answered. “Maybe if we leave Tesla’s schematics for the death ray to the past, uncompleted, it would pass into history as just a theory. Maybe leaving the design in the dust of World War II we might avoid World War III.”

  “Wait, what do you mean by ‘sending a man back in time was captured on film ‘this time’?” Sam frowned. Nina stared at the frail, emaciated genius and wondered why the world’s most brilliant minds always rested in the weakest vessels.

  “That’s the most sense you have made since I’ve met you,” Nina told Lydia, folding her arms. “Leave the bloody weapon alone. Weapons never beget peace or power and you know it. But being known for making science fiction science fact is a far better feat. You know full well the maniacs in power these days are the last toddlers who should be given a loaded gun.” Nina’s voice had calmed considerably. She sat down next to Lydia’s chair. “Bring him back, professor.”

  “What do you mean we filmed time travel this time, Lydia?” Sam repeated with more frustration. “Have you done this to someone else before? Is this why you had to send Purdue? You sent someone back before and let me guess – he failed to come back, didn’t he?”

  Lydia looked distraught. She simply dropped her eyes to the ground. Sam, aware that he was the one who promoted patience and self control a minute ago, grew annoyed at Lydia’s non-response.

  “Professor Jenner, I really must insist!” he said loudly, trying not to shout.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ! Enough already!” Lydia growled. Her eyes almost disappeared under her scowling brow as she erupted. “What is it you want to hear, Sam Cleave? Does it sound like another juicy story for you to plant another petty prize on your mantle? Huh?” The professor bellowed like a beast in her deep rasp. She rolled her eyes and threw her head back, “Good God! I am so fed-up with people who do not appreciate the meaning of sacrifice! Sacrifice! A thing I know…” her voice broke and her breathing raced. Her quivering breath fell into words again. “It is a thing I know first-hand.”

  She turned her chair to face Sam squarely. “Don’t you ever…ever…insinuate that I surrendered another to my obsession! My passion for science took my all, no-one else’s. My quest to finish the unfinished left by a great, but cheated master has cost me everything,” she cried, gesturing to her fragile body. “I gave everything because Tesla deserves the complete triumph he could not attain in his lifetime. So don’t you dare insinuate, Sam, that I do not care what happens to Dave where he is. David Purdue is the only man I know who understands sacrifice for one’s passion like I do. And he knew the risks, but he went because he knows what it is like not to know – not to know if that one risk that seemed too much, could have been the door to the answers.”

  Sam had no comeback. She did not answer what he was really asking her, but she did make it crystal clear that she was not the self serving bitch they assumed she was. However, Nina, who had been listening closely to the spat, knew that answer.

  “You don’t have brain cancer, do you?” she asked the weeping woman. Nina’s question sounded like an acknowledgement, more than any inquiry.

  Lydia shook her head slowly from side to side, feeling an immense measure of relief to finally be able to tell someone.

  “What do you mean?” Sam asked Nina.

  “Jesus, Sam, you can be so slow sometimes,” Nina sighed. She turned her attention to Lydia, who repeatedly breathed out deep sighs as she embraced her renewed release. The historian studied Lydia’s condition with her eyes. With great concern and sympathy she asked, “Professor, is this going to happen to Purdue when he comes back through that…” she motioned to the chamber, “…doorway?”

  Sam suddenly realized. “Wait, this is not a terminal illness, it is the effects of the Tesla Experiment?” He was astonished.

  “Yes,” Lydia admitted. “You can’t exactly tell people you suffer from Time Travel Syndrome or whatever when you look like shit. I’m not even fifty yet and I look like a monster. So I cried cancer, and nobody batted an eyelid because it was a monster they knew. People don’t like things they can’t explain or prove, and they don’t like people they cannot classify to put them at ease. If they think you have a terminal illness you have their permission to be broken.”

  “So the figure Albert Tägtgren saw going up in flames at CERN…that was you?” Sam asked. At the mention of the engineer’s name his stomach sank, but he kept a straight face that hid his thoughts.

  “That was me. But we did not film that one for the record, simply because it was so – unexpected,” Lydia smiled bitterly. “I activated the particle fields with the capacitors in the container under Alice, because they were so much stronger than the type I had at my disposal. I never thought it would function; not in practice! It was not supposed to do anything but provide me with a tremendous electrical current so that I could test Tesla’s accuracy on the prescribed amount of force.”

  “So what went wrong? Or right, perhaps?” Nina asked.

  “Sound interfered,” Lydia replied plainly. “Just the one element I did not calculate because it wasn’t part of the experiment. The Tesla Experiment was mainly to measure the probability of the various components invol
ved to produce the adequate voltage and acceleration to thrust the energy beam with enough force,” she explained. “But the alarm went off in that section just as the force field achieved enough power. So, with the decibels of the alarm exceeding the threshold of the frequency it sounded on, the teleforce experiment resulted in an inadvertent discovery altogether.”

  “So instead of testing a prospective ray gun the unexpected alarm caused time travel?” Nina asked in amazement. Lydia chuckled foolishly at the wonderfully simplified truth that sounded absolutely ludicrous.

  “Strange, isn’t it? And that is why I was adamant to obtain the original notes Nikola Tesla made on the so-called ‘death ray’ while I was…well, away. At least then I could build the machine he envisioned, not some apparatus devised by guesswork.”

  “Unbelievable!” I mean that,” Nina exclaimed in wonder. She hated admitting it to herself, but she saw Lydia Jenner in a completely different light now. No longer did she feel angry at Lydia’s pursuit of the elusive notes. If her body was ravaged so utterly by an accident of physics, the least she could do was to use the discovered method to procure the original plan. It only bothered her that Purdue was the one scouting for it.

  “And how did you come back, then?” Sam asked her, surreptitiously recording the story she told. “Surely you did not have the proper device, because you had not invented it yet.”

  “You’re right,” Lydia said. “I have to admit to my disgrace that I used seduction to get around while I was there. I met Helmut at a symposium relating to Armaments and when I mentioned Tesla’s work on charged particle beam weapons, he bragged about having confiscated materials from Tesla’s room after his death in 1943.”

  Sam was amused by her resourcefulness. “So you seduced him,” he smiled.

  “Seduced him? Honey, I rode him bareback,” she winked, evoking their laughter at her forwardness. Her merry relation withered to a reminiscence of regret. “But I was there for far longer than I surmised, you see. That is partly why I ended up decaying physically like this. I lingered there for too long, so to speak. You see, within the ether there is no chronological order and so every destination visited by a traveler would hold a different rate of cellular regression, that which we call time.”

  “Aging?” Sam asked. “But you don’t look old, just…”

  “Sick,” she nodded. “Think of it as a desert storm.”

  Sam looked as confused as Nina, but both were intrigued. Nina had forgotten about Purdue’s predicament by now and Sam was worried about his memory card running out of space before Professor Jenner was done explaining.

  “A desert storm? Do tell,” Sam pressed.

  “Well, imagine your body is a landscape of flat and loose sand, like a desert. Now imagine that one droplet of water falls for every day of your life,” Lydia described slowly.

  “I’m with you,” Sam acknowledged.

  Lydia continued, “Right. Now. What happened to me while in the ether - and the two days I spent with Helmut - is the equivalent of a rainstorm on my desert. Each particle of radiation, each cosmic ray, existent duration, thermal fluctuation, and so on and so forth, collided with and eroded the cellular aspects of my anatomy.”

  “Jesus,” Nina whispered sympathetically.

  “By the time I finally found my way back I arrived in the chamber, barely alive from cellular deterioration,” Lydia shrugged. Carefully she rolled back her sleeves to reveal seared skin tissue. “The intense electrical current that facilitates entry into the ether ‘highway’ literally causes combustion, but fortunately it happens so rapidly that it rarely singes deeper than the epidermis.”

  “Oh, good!” Nina gasped. “Well, at least that’s lucky.”

  Lydia gave Nina a weary leer and shook her head. “Your sarcasm is not welcome, Dr. Gould.”

  Sam chuckled at the banter between the ladies. Unlike their previous exchanges a milder, more amicable mood prevailed.

  23

  “With respect, Frau Orsic, the man is insane. I can believe a scientifically possible stance, but really, to tell the future? It is madness! Not to mention that by such a claim he is ridiculing the acumen of the Waffen-SS and the High Command in general,” Sturmbannführer Diekmann argued with Maria.

  He was busy preparing for his company to move out toward Haute-Vienne and had only reported briefly in Berlin before rejoining the mobilization. As commander of the Waffen-SS, 1st Battalion, he would soon join his men in Southern France to help stop the Allied advance. Sturmbannführer Diekmann’s battalion was part of the 4th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment (“Der Führer”) that served with the invasion of France.

  “Please, Sturmbannführer, you have to listen to me. Sigrun and I both saw something unbelievable take place right in front of our eyes and Herr Purdue was its architect. Both the Führer and Reichsführer Himmler have agreed that you are to take Herr Purdue with you to the front,” she retorted forcefully.

  Adolf Diekmann was not about to be ordered around by a mere civilian woman with no significance in the Waffen-SS. He stepped forward, standing inches from Maria and sneered, “Let’s get one thing straight. You might be a famous medium who runs one of our secret societies, talking to ghosts and channeling extra-terrestrial beings and I don’t know what else, but if the Führer wishes me to dance to your puppetry, my dear, he would have to issue the order himself.”

  “Sturmbannführer,” a subordinate officer greeted, holding a signed order from Heinrich Himmler. “This is for you, sir. Directly from the Reichsführer.”

  Maria smiled, only infuriating Diekmann even more with her satisfied glow. He grabbed the order stipulating Dave Purdue’s accompaniment to the front with him, and perused it briefly. In the order it stated that Purdue had invaluable information to be advised.

  Diekmann glared at the beautiful leader of the Vril Society and asked, “What does this imbecile possibly have that we need, Maria? If he could really tell the future he would have known that he was going to get captured inside the Reichkanzlei, wouldn’t he?”

  “Please listen, Adolf. Besides what I bore witness to, I know the Führer is behind him too. So, are you implying that the Führer is incompetent in his decisions?” she teased with a very serious undertone he dared not tempt.

  “Of course not!” Diekmann bellowed. “What was it that convinced all of you to trust this man?”

  She leaned towards him with her striking big eyes and glorious lips, “Herr Purdue told me that Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, commander of the ‘Das Reich’ division would be kidnapped by the French Resistance…tonight.” Her whisper was positively chilling.

  Diekmann chuckled in disbelief and shook his head at her. “That prediction does not signify that Purdue is psychic, my dear. It rather denotes that he is a spy. How else would he know the business of the Resistance?”

  She could not rebut his statement. As his eyes danced from side to side on hers, she realized that he had a very fair point, yet she would not concede to it.

  “There is more to him than this. I know what I saw,” she reminded Diekmann. “Make sure he is well taken care of, would you? The Reichsführer is counting on your cooperation with regards to our newest member.”

  “He is part of the Vril Society now? He just waltzes in under suspicious circumstances, does one magic trick and now he is connected to the SS Elite?” Diekmann laughed skeptically. “Unglaublich!”

  “If that chews at your ego, Adolf, then I suppose this next bit of news will have your head spinning,” she smiled mockingly as he waited anxiously to hear what she had to say. “After telling the Führer what Purdue knew, and what we saw, and after he heard that Purdue worked with George Viereck’s close friend Nikola Tesla, a meeting was arranged for next Sunday at Wewelsburg,” she piled it on for him, each fact wounding his pride like a silver bullet. “Dave Purdue is being inducted into the prestigious Order of the Black Sun.”

  The revelation was so far beyond absurd that Diekmann simply sneered at her, pausing to take in the rid
iculousness of it all. He looked at each of the stone faced soldiers in the room and finally headed toward the door, leaving Maria behind to gloat. As he exited the office he shouted casually, “Make sure he is ready tomorrow night at 21:00 Hours.”

  Purdue sat in his new cell, which had been cleaned along with the other three. The electrical lights illuminated the grey masonry and steel bunks in each cage and in the distance he could hear the occasional laughter of German conversation between officers and female staff of the Chancellery. Under his sleeves his skin had somewhat healed and the worst of the sting had subsided. No longer did Purdue have to catch his breath in agony every time he accidentally grazed against fabric or objects.

  He sat in the otherwise quiet extension of the second floor below the city of Berlin, wondering what was going on above the ground. Purdue had been here many times in his life, but never before could he say he visited the square during the biggest modern war time in Germany. When he imagined that he could possibly run into the most evil Austrian of all time at any moment, Purdue was filled with both loathing and awe. To meet a historical figure of such significance would have to be the biggest moment of one’s life, unless he was going to meet Adolf Hitler face to face just before taking his place in front of an SS firing squad. That would be a tragedy.

  ‘What would Nina say if I had a picture taken with Himmler or Goebbels?’ he pondered with a smile. It felt strange to smile again, especially amidst the constant fear for his fate. But Purdue hoped that Sigrun and Maria could liberate him at least from the cells, even if they planned to shove him back into the very cult he had been combating for most of his adult life, the Black Sun.

  Since he was now more of a guest and less of a prisoner he was not as nervous about footfalls approaching his cell anymore. Ever since the two women left him earlier he had been wondering what was going to happen now that he let it leak to the High Command that he predicted the abduction of one of their officers. Of course he ran the risk of being marked a plain spy with intelligence on movements he could appear to be involved in, but if he played dumb for long enough the Vril Society was bound to protect him from the Waffen-SS.