by Ian Douglas
Or, to be honest, quite frightening.
He tried to distract himself. Twenty years into the future! What would life be like, what would technology be like in that far-off age of 1965? Antigravity? Flying cars? The important thing was that people might have forgotten the excesses of the Third Reich. Not that wiping out the Jews was a bad thing, but the rest of the world simply didn’t understand.
Nullifiers inoperational, the pilot thought at him. Brace yourself.
Brace yourself? In God’s name, how?
The weight crushing him increased sharply, then fell away. It felt as though the craft had just changed its heading somewhat, slightly to the left. He wished he understood more about The Bell’s technology.
He wished he could see.
He tried to remember everything he could about The Bell. Ssarsk and several of its compatriots had been helping the Nazis for almost a decade. An alien craft had come down in a wooded Bavarian valley in 1936. Of the pilots—bulb-headed, skinny, just over a meter high, with enormous black eyes with no hint of white to them at all—only one had survived, but Ssarsk’s compatriots, a different species, had shown up soon thereafter. The Reich was already in the process of studying the wreckage, which was largely complete, hoping to back-engineer the craft.
The Eidechse had offered to help.
And all they’d asked in return was to become silent partners, as it were, in the world government the Reich planned to create.
The Eidechse had contributed incredible levels of knowledge to the Reich’s scientists. Von Braun’s rocket designs at Peenemünde, the disk-shaped craft being tested at Hauneberg, the new superbomb developed by Kurt Diebner—progress on all of them had been tremendously advanced by the Eidechse visitors. It was one of the brutal ironies of war that the Reich had collapsed mere months before the most powerful of those weapons could be deployed on the battlefield.
The machine referred to by the code name Die Glocke—“The Bell”—had started as an experiment in true antigravity, but the Eidechse had revealed a key fact of long-range space travel: traveling faster than light was also traveling in time. The Jew physicist Einstein had supposedly demonstrated that space and time were the same thing, that translation in one of four dimensions could be turned into translation in another. The Bell, it seemed, was proof of this, despite the fact that Reich science had been working for years to repudiate the theories of Jewish physics.
Ssarsk had piloted the prototype craft into space, made what it called a dimensional translation, and brought the craft back into Earth’s atmosphere.
The only question now was whether they could survive the landing.
That, and what year it would be when they landed.
Another course change, the pilot thought at him. Acceleration surged, and again there was a sharp sensation, this time to the right.
The vibration had largely faded away now, and Kammler could hear a rushing sound that he took to be the sound of wind whipping past the hull outside. Smoke continued to fill the compartment, however, and he realized that something must be burning inside the craft.
The Bell slowed almost to a stop, then made a broad, sweeping turn. We land. Brace yourself.
They hit something hard and the vibration returned, the noise a shrill thunder as if the craft was plowing backward through dirt. And then . . .
The stillness, the silence, were eerie. The craft’s internal illumination was gone, and they sat there in pitch-black darkness.
We arrive.
“Did we make it?” Kammler started coughing, and finally managed to add, “Did we go through time?”
Unknown. I will find out. The hatch opened, and cold air spilled inside, clearing the smoke. There was a little light, as well; he saw that it was dark outside, but he could make out the shapes of trees against an overcast sky. It looked as though they’d come down in a wooded area. There were patches of snow on the ground.
“Wait!” he called as Ssarsk slipped through the open hatch. He struggled with his harness, but couldn’t find the clip. “Don’t leave me!”
Remain here, the alien thought at him. I will be back. And the hatch hissed shut.
“I don’t know how to operate the hatch mechanism!” Kammler shouted, but there was no mental response.
Damn!
The Bell had been reconstructed by the SS and by slave workers, but the actual design of the shell and power plant and drive had been alien, and most of the mechanisms and the secrets of how it worked were understood, if at all, by only a few humans—none of whom were Kammler. The aliens had operated it during tests, and it required an alien pilot. Kammler was only now realizing just how dependent he was on the Eidechse’s goodwill. He was locked in, with no way out that he could find. Some of the craft’s mechanisms, he knew, were actually controlled by thought; Ssarsk had worn a slender circlet around his head that, he presumed, let him operate the craft.
He waited there in the dark for hours.
Something thumped against the outer hull.
He jerked awake. Had he fallen asleep? More thumps and bumps sounded from outside. What was that?
“Ssarsk?” he called.
Now he could hear voices. Physical voices, not the mental transmissions of the alien.
He couldn’t make them out, but he could tell from the tone and the lack of gutturals that they were not speaking German.
Was that English? He spoke a little. . . .
The hatch banged open, again admitting the dim light from outside, blinding after hours in the dark. A shape—a human shape—blocked the entryway as someone leaned inside.
“General Hans Kammler?” the shape said. “Willkommen in Pennsylvania! Und in der Zukunft! Wir haben dich erwartet!”
“Welcome to Pennsylvania and the future! We’ve been expecting you!”
“Mein Gott! Ich habe es gemacht!”
He’d made it.
The next afternoon they flew Hunter and five of his men out to Wright-Patt.
The so-called Hangar 18, he was told, was something of a fixture in UFO legend, the place where the Air Force stored crashed saucers and the bodies of diminutive gray aliens. In fact, that was a myth. There was no Hangar 18 at the sprawling US Air Force base just outside of Dayton, Ohio.
There was, however, something called “Complex-1B,” a sprawling underground facility accessed through a three-story office building and layer upon layer of security checkpoints. And within the complex was “the Blue Room,” where some of America’s most important secrets were kept hidden from the public eye.
Air Force master sergeant Donald Gilroy was the source of this revelation. Hunter was seated next to the man in the C-17—the same aircraft that had brought him from Japan, in fact—as it droned its way east.
“So, aren’t you going to get into trouble talking to us about this?” Hunter asked.
“Nah,” Gilroy replied. “You people have all been cleared up to USAP, right?” Unacknowledged Special Access Programs. “You’re gonna be hearing a lot of hush-hush stuff at Wright-Patt. I’m just laying the groundwork for you.”
In the normal scheme of things, Hunter knew, there were just six levels of security clearance for American military personnel: Restricted, Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret, plus two special classifications—Special Compartmented Information and USAP. There wasn’t supposed to be anything above Top Secret, and the UFO whistle-blowers claiming to reveal stuff at “above Top Secret” or higher didn’t understand how the US government security classification system worked.
Top Secret, however, had been given a great many subcategories, each higher than the one before. Top Secret Crypto encompassed twenty-eight separate levels; the President of the United States, reportedly, was only at level seventeen. And there were higher classifications above TS Crypto 28.
Gilroy wouldn’t tell them what his security classification level was. He did tell them that a USAP clearance did not normally allow access to information about UFOs. Special allowances were made, he said, fo
r personnel who were being checked out for higher clearances, a process that would take time.
So during that time, however, Hunter and his five companions would be given some information, with the promise of more to follow.
“What you’re telling us,” Hunter said slowly, “is that UFOs are real? Roswell and all of that?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Gilroy replied. “You didn’t think otherwise, did you? After what you saw in Korea?”
“No. Not really. There was still some doubt, though.”
“That’s right,” Minkowski said. “There’s always room for doubt. We could have all been on our way to a Section Eight!”
Several of the SEALs laughed. Section Eight meant being discharged from the service because you were crazy.
“I promise you that all of you are completely sane,” Gilroy told them. “The question is whether you’ll still be sane after you get a tour of Complex-1B.”
“Why?” Taylor asked. “What’re we going to see?”
“Ha! You’ll find out.” But he’d say no more about the facility.
Gilroy did tell them a story, though, about something that had supposedly happened back in the midsixties. Then Senator Barry Goldwater, who’d been the Republican nominee for president in 1964, had had a long-standing fascination for UFOs. A major general in the USAF, a senator from Arizona, and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he’d repeatedly tried to gain access to the Blue Room.
In 1994, Goldwater appeared on Larry King Live to talk about UFOs. According to him, he’d asked no less a personage than the chief of staff for the US Air Force, General Curtis LeMay, for help in getting into the Blue Room. According to Goldwater, LeMay had gone ballistic. Furiously angry, madder than Goldwater had ever seen him, he’d cussed the senator out, then told him, “Don’t you ever ask me that question again!”
Someone—quite probably someone not in the regular chain of command—took secrecy about UFOs very seriously indeed. It seemed that not even the President was told everything . . . and often he was told nothing.
They touched down at Wright-Patterson and were driven to a nondescript office building somewhere in the middle of a forest of hangars, offices, and storage sheds. They were met in the lobby, just inside an initial security checkpoint, by an Air Force major named Frank Benedict, who took a clipboard from Gilroy, signed something on it, and handed it back. It was, Hunter thought, very much like the chain-of-custody receipt required when prisoners were transferred from one keeper to another.
Were they prisoners? It was distinctly possible. Hunter did not imagine for a moment that he could tell Benedict “so long!” then turn on his heel and walk away.
Benedict took his time looking through a sheaf of orders that had been transmitted to his command. “Lieutenant Commander Mark Hunter?” he asked, looking up.
“Yes, sir.”
“Master Chief Arnold Minkowski.”
“Present, sir!”
“Chief Roger Brunelli.”
“Here, sir.”
“EN1 Thomas Taylor.”
“Yes, sir.”
“RM1 Ralph Colby.”
“Yes, sir.”
“. . . and TM1 Frank Nielson.”
“Yessir.”
“Okay. You men have received USAP clearance levels, and I have been directed to show you what is popularly known as ‘the Blue Room.’ I will remind you that all of you have signed security paperwork in which you’ve promised not to divulge anything that you see here . . . right?”
A chorus of “yessirs” sounded from the Navy personnel.
“You breathe a word about any of this and you’ll be out on your ears so fast your heads will spin. You’ll lose your pensions, your reputations, and even your identities, so no one will believe a thing you say. And then you’ll spend a minimum of twenty years in Portsmouth for violating the Secrets Act. You all hear me?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Just so that’s clear.”
Benedict then ushered them down a series of halls, through various twists and turns, with stops at each of an additional five security checkpoints. During the journey, the six men were scanned for metal, photographed, fingerprinted, had their retinas examined, and gave voice prints. Finally, they took an elevator down; Hunter couldn’t begin to guess how far down, but it was quite a way. The descent took almost a full minute.
The elevator stopped, the doors slid open, and Hunter and the other SEALs stepped into another passageway with another checkpoint. Here they had their palms scanned and their retinas checked again, before a massive steel door hissed open . . .
. . . and Hunter wondered just how far down the rabbit hole they’d gone.
“Time travel,” Dr. Lawrence Brody said with an air of utter dismissal, “is bunk.”
“Physics says that, does it?” Navy captain Frederick Groton said.
“Exactly. Where would causality be if we could zip back in time and kill our own grandfathers?”
Brody and Groton were in the mess hall of a facility so secret that the government had only recently even admitted that the place existed—despite ample evidence from satellite photos and the unwinking gaze of Google Earth. Area 51 was very, very real. And actively being used.
“My understanding,” Groton said slowly, “is that if we changed history somehow, we would simply move over to an alternate time line, one where we had never been born. No paradox. The universe—the multiverse, I should say—would never allow that.”
“An entire universe—hundreds of billions of galaxies, quintillions of stars, worlds and civilizations without number, all of it identical to this one, down to the smallest detail except for my existence—created in an instant just because I shot dear old Gramps before my father was conceived? The universe is wasteful, Captain, but not that wasteful. It certainly doesn’t create an entire universe around the absence of one man.”
“That, as I understand it, is the basic theory behind the many-universe concept.”
“Captain . . . do you have a degree in astrophysics? In cosmology? In quantum dynamics?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, I do—all three! And I’m telling you that quantum theory does not support so absurd a statement about the nature of the cosmos. How do you summon an entire universe out of nothing? Where does all that matter come from in the blink of an eye? Where is the energy, man?”
“I believe the idea,” Groton said, “is that this other universe already exists. That, in fact, every universe that could possibly exist does exist—including one where your grandfather was regrettably killed as a young man. Not an infinite number, certainly, but a very, very, very large number of them. Rather than creating a new universe, a better way to say it might be that you simply step from one reality to another.”
“Yes, Captain, I know. You needn’t lecture me on cosmology.”
“That was not my intent, Doctor. But I am telling you that time travel is possible. We know it to be true because we’ve done it.”
“Bullshit! Where’s your proof?”
Groton melodramatically patted his white uniform jacket. “Damn. I must have left it in my other coat.”
“Very funny.”
A woman approached the table, holding a tray of food. “Hello, Captain,” she said. “May I join you?”
“Of course!” He rose, gesturing to a chair, and Brody managed to get to his feet a moment later. The woman was, simply put, impossibly gorgeous. There was no other word for it. Brody was fifty-five years old, but his hormones were kicking in with all the force and red-faced stammer of a sixteen-year-old adolescent boy. The woman was tall and slender with large and startlingly blue eyes; long silver hair, though her face looked like she was only in her twenties; and a silver jumper or suit of some sort that Brody was prepared to swear was spray painted onto her body.
“Please sit, gentlemen,” this vision told them.
“Elanna,” Groton said, “this is Dr. Brody, our professor of astrophysics on the Big-H.
Dr. Brody? Elanna.”
“A pleasure, Doctor.” She extended one slender hand.
Somehow, Brody managed to take the hand, and felt her give it a squeeze.
“We were just discussing time travel, Elanna,” Groton said. “Dr. Brody was explaining to me why time travel is impossible.”
She laughed. “Really? Do tell me!”
Brody’s face burned. He had the distinct feeling that both of them were making fun of him. “Well, according to current theory . . .” he began.
“Don’t even go there, Professor,” Groton told Brody. “You’ll lose.”
“What do you mean?” He couldn’t look away from the silvery beauty sitting next to him.
“Doctor . . .” Groton said, and then he hesitated. There was so much Brody still didn’t know, and it was entirely possible that some of it he would never know, never accept, if only because his brain was too old and inflexible to wrap itself around some of this stuff. “Dr. Brody,” he tried again. “You’ve been through indoctrination. You know the truth, or a large part of it. You’ve seen some things that, for most people, would be very hard to believe.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve seen the Grays—”
“Yes, yes! Horrible things! What’s your point?”
“Elanna here is . . .” He paused, trying to find the right way to explain it. He settled on, “A kind of alien. Alien to us, at any rate.”
“But she’s human!”
“Indeed. I’m as human as you are, Doctor,” the woman said. She smiled, and Brody felt the rush of hormones once more.
“Elanna,” Groton continued, “is human, but she’s from the future. She’s from roughly eleven thousand years in the future, in fact.”
“My God!” And the shock jolted him backward and knocked him out of his chair.
“A spaceship!” Taylor said with an edge of sheer reverence in his voice. “A fucking alien spaceship!”
“Actually,” Benedict said, “it’s one of ours.”
Hunter gave Benedict a sharp look. “So we do have advanced spacecraft?”
“For a good many years, Commander, yes. That is a TR-3B, and it’s one reason we no longer have a space shuttle.”