The announcement of Unity Day, a day to celebrate the end of war and a uniting of the western nations, had been met with rapturous approval by the citizens of the Greater Reich. Karl was certain future Unity Days would be celebrated with street parties everywhere, people in every city in every country of Kramer’s empire happy to draw a line under two thousand years of bloody history. Wars, crusades, religious intolerance, inquisitions, torture, ethnic cleansing, holocausts – all of those dark things in the past now.
He rapped his knuckles against the thick wooden doors, waiting until he heard Kramer beckon him in. He pushed them open, stepped inside and saluted his leader.
Kramer was sitting in the window alcove, looking down at a misty morning. He could just make out the dome at the top of the White House poking through the pale blanket covering Washington, the orange glow of street lamps along Pennsylvania Avenue and the pinprick headlights of slow-moving cars making their way sluggishly to work.
Presently, he turned to look at Karl and offered him a warm smile. ‘Good morning, Karl. How are you?’
Karl relaxed his posture, dropping his stiff salute and stepping towards his leader, his friend. ‘I’m well.’
Kramer shook his head. ‘It’s amazing how quickly normality returns, isn’t it? Out there… people go to work, go to school, visit their friends, their loved ones, just as they always have. They have a new leader, a new flag… but life simply goes on for them.’
‘Yes… Paul.’
‘The American people, it seems,’ continued Kramer, ‘have already accepted the way of things.’
Karl stirred uncomfortably. Except, of course, those troublesome people attacking the prison camps.
‘So,’ said Kramer, ‘shall we get on with this morning’s briefing? I have other matters to attend to.’
‘Of course. I have the usual stack of papers for you to sign; most of them are approvals for regional state governors – sympathetic politicians mostly.’ Karl leaned over and placed the papers on the desk. Kramer got up from the window seat and sat down at the desk, flicking wearily through the forms and signing them absent-mindedly.
‘So much paperwork these days,’ he sighed.
‘The remaining US military forces regrouped in Texas have agreed informal terms for surrender. I believe it’s General MacArthur who’s in charge there.’
‘Good… good. Silly their fighting on needlessly.’
‘He’s hoping that we’ll grant clemency for the senior officers, allow them to return to their families.’
Kramer continued scribbling his name as he talked. ‘To be honest, it’s the senior officers I don’t trust. Tell MacArthur his troops will be disarmed and allowed to disband, to go home. But I’m afraid he and his high command will be interned along with all our other political prisoners,’ uttered Kramer, leafing impatiently through the papers. ‘Until, that is, I’m satisfied they won’t be tempted to lead any troublesome uprisings.’
Karl shuffled uncomfortably. ‘On that subject… we are having a few problems in the Washington area.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Raids. Some insurgents attacking our prison camps.’
Kramer looked up at him, his pen poised.
‘Five camps have been raided so far,’ Karl continued. ‘The garrisons were over-powered and quite a few detainees managed to escape on each occasion.’
‘I presume these insurgents are some rogue US army unit? How many of them are we talking about?’
‘Well, there’s some confusion there, sir,’ said Karl awkwardly. ‘Eyewitness reports on the earlier raids indicated a very small raiding party.’
‘How small?’
‘Well, actually, just one man.’
‘What?’
‘Clearly it can’t be just one man. That would be madness. But among some of the prisoners that we’ve managed to recapture there’s a spreading rumour that some sort of… of a superman… has come to their aid. They describe a large figure off which bullets bounce –’
‘A superman?’
Karl smiled. ‘Clearly it’s wishful thinking, a fantasy. The Americans have always liked their comic-books, their heroic figures in silly costumes. It’s not unreasonable that their hopes and prayers have taken the form of this kind of mythical figure.’
Karl was unsettled by the sudden look of distraction on his Führer’s face, as if half his attention was elsewhere, listening to a faintly heard tune, or a conversation coming from the room next door.
‘In all likelihood, sir, the insurgents may well be a small group of well-trained soldiers, US marines… US airborne, highly motivated and well equipped and so far they’ve just managed to be very lucky.’
Kramer nodded. ‘Yes… yes. Perhaps you’re right.’
‘Nonetheless, sir, I suggest it would be wise to double the garrison strengths on the other camps in the region. Too many successful raids like these might just encourage other insurgents to join in.’
Kramer was silent, his face clouded, his brows locked in a frown of concentration as if he was trying to listen to someone else. Karl noticed he’d not shaved this morning, a faint blur of silver-grey bristles on his chin, and he spotted the slightest sporadic tremble in the man’s jaw. Small things that only a close friend would notice.
Small things that worried him.
He’s having some kind of a breakdown?
‘Paul? Are you all right?’
‘Yes… yes, of course,’ said Kramer absently. His gaze returned from where it had been and focused back on to Karl. ‘Take what action you think is necessary with these raids.’
Kramer hastily scribbled his signature on the last few sheets of paper, handed them back and offered him a flickering smile. ‘Thank you, Karl. You may leave now.’
‘Yes, sir.’
He offered a clipped salute, turned on his heel and departed the observation lounge.
Kramer waited until he heard the footsteps recede down the hallway outside.
To work.
‘To work,’ he agreed, stepping quickly across the polished floor towards his study door. He turned the brass handle and stepped through into his sanctum sanctorum: book-lined walls, several leather armchairs and a work table littered with drafting materials. It was very much a replica of his private study back in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, a place to think, to tinker with his weapons designs, to ruminate on empire-wide policy.
From his desk drawer he pulled out a little black notebook, the corners curled and scuffed, the pages of handwritten notes beginning to yellow with the years now. A precious book of thoughts and ideas, theories and secrets. His younger handwriting so scribbled and impatient.
In the year 2056, he’d been barely twenty years of age and such a devout fan of the mysterious inventor Roald Waldstein. His reputation as an elusive genius, the one and only man to mathematically formulate a displacement field that could fold a gap through space-time. The only man to have actually tested the theory with a working prototype. An honorary director of the International Institute of Quantum Research, and the American Museum of Natural History, a wealthy entrepreneur, a scientific adviser to presidents… a complete enigma.
Kramer’s hard work and promising talent had earned him an internship at Waldstein’s prestigious New Jersey research centre, several months in the company of the great old man himself. Waldstein liked to be in the company of keen young minds. He’d taken warmly to Kramer. The other keen young minds, jealous fellow interns, suggested that Paul Kramer reminded the sentimental old man of the son he’d lost many years before.
Kramer smiled at the pleasant memories, those weeks with that great mind, earning his confidence, listening to his theories about how the unseen dimensions of the metaverse held
everything together in a way beyond the comprehension of most human minds. Struggling to keep up with him, yet understanding just enough, parts of it fitted together in his young head.
The old man’s over-riding passion, though, what kept him awake late at nights and fired him up with a preacher’s zeal, was to bury the technology he alone had pioneered – the potential for time travel. To ensure absolutely no one followed in his footsteps. For Kramer, it had been frustrating to be discussing with this great man his most advanced theoretical work and then for Waldstein to suddenly grow cautious on the subject of displacement theory.
An old man. He must have been about sixty then, but he seemed so much older and frailer than that, with hands that shook and trembled constantly, and watery eyes that always seemed to dart towards dark corners. And his bizarre rituals – every morning after breakfast, Kramer watched him shuffle towards a curious sheet of yellowing newsprint, framed behind glass and hung on his wall. Waldstein stared at it for several minutes every day with eyes that leaked tears down his sunken cheeks.
Kramer had glanced at it once, nothing more than a page of personal ads from some old newspaper, lonely men seeking lonely women.
Waldstein was losing his mind… and in the quiet moments, sitting with young Kramer beside the warming fire, he let slip perhaps a little too much. Old enough and perhaps trusting enough of Kramer to let him know a little more than he should have.
Kramer fingered his tatty old notebook now. Pages of mathematical characters and equations, the parts of the old man’s puzzle that he’d carelessly let go, interspersed with pages and pages of angrily crossed-out formulae that Kramer himself had worked on over the years. Pieces of equation that he’d tried to squeeze into the spaces, to make right with Waldstein’s elegant work… and that always seemed to not quite fit.
He smiled at the notes scrawled across the draftsman’s sheet on the desk.
It fits together now, though, Paul. Doesn’t it?
Some of it did – the ‘Waldstein displacement field’. It had taken Kramer fifteen years on and off, thinking the problem over in his private moments. A personal hobby, an affliction, perhaps.
The field – the Waldstein field – in theory, on paper, was merely a method to crack open the tiniest gap in space-time. That alone didn’t make a time machine, just a way to open a peek-hole into the very fabric of space-time. Kramer needed computing power at his fingertips to make a time machine. Computing power to precisely navigate through the swirling chaos of a dimension that mankind had no business entering. There were no Apple Macs here in 1956, no PCs, no palmtops or organizers that could be cannibalized, adapted.
The schematic sketched out on the sheet of paper in front of him was for a device he could construct merely allowing him to open a tiny window and tap infinite energy from the swirling chaos beyond.
There’d been something Waldstein had once said to him: ‘To open time-space is to open a door into Hell itself.’
You’ve been through that door before.
‘Yes,’ he uttered softly, ‘stepped into Hell.’ His voice trembled with a mixture of fear and excitement. Waldstein had also once said something to a much younger Kramer, something that had unsettled him back then, and did so now.
‘Consider this, Paul… If a man can place a foot in Hell, then whatever exists there might just as easily use the same door and place a foot in our world.’
Those words tormented him now because he realized it was something far worse than some agent from the future after him. Something far more frightening.
You must hurry, Paul… before it seeks you out.
‘To work,’ said Kramer, pushing a forgotten plate of food aside on his desk.
CHAPTER 56
1957, New Jersey
Bob studied the map in front of him. A dozen crosses scrawled on the map indicated the locations of other prison camps between Washington DC and New York. Simple logic dictated that Liam O’Connor had to have been taken to one of these. So far nine of these scrawled crosses had been paid a visit: nine prison camps broken into, searched and left behind in a state of chaos, prisoners surging out the way he’d smashed in, buildings on fire, the bodies of guards and unfortunate civilians littering the ground.
And so far he’d been unlucky. Nine camps… no sign of Liam.
[Mission evaluation: success probability reduced to 31%]
The camps were becoming harder to break into. There seemed to be more guards stationed at each now and they were more alert – ready and waiting to be attacked. After the last raid Bob had walked away with at least a dozen bullet wounds across his body. It had taken five days for the wounds to heal. Five days of lying still, devoting all of his body’s energy towards the process of recovering.
The small man who had decided to tag along with him, Raymond Panelli, had watched over him, taken care of him as he lay motionless in a state akin to suspended animation, healing. Bob wondered why Raymond Panelli would care to do that. For that matter, he wondered why a growing band of humans was following him around from camp to camp. With each of his raids, he seemed to be picking up more and more of them. Tactically speaking they were, of course, useful; they drew some of the enemy fire from him.
His stomach rumbled noisily and Bob’s computer brain reminded him that it was time to refuel his body with some protein. The food being served up by his growing band of camp followers – a variety of stews, broths and soups – wasn’t as nutrient-rich as the highly efficient protein solution he was used to consuming back in the field office’s birthing tubes, but it would do as a stopgap.
He folded the map carefully and emerged from his tent, stepping through the briar and undergrowth, stooping beneath the low-hanging branches as he made his way towards the campfire.
As he approached, one of his followers hurried over to him with a steaming bowl of soup.
‘For you, Captain Bob, sir.’
Bob took the bowl and stepped towards the fire, finding a space on the ground amid the silent crowd of men. They followed his every movement with wide eyes. He sat down heavily, cross-legged, stared at the flickering fire and began mechanically spooning soup into his mouth.
The human called Raymond Panelli leaned forward. ‘Captain Bob, we’ve got ourselves another bunch of fighters for the cause. Joined us just this evening.’
Bob stopped mid-spoon and looked up from the fire at him.
‘These guys right here,’ said Panelli, pointing out some men clustered near the fire. They stared in awed silence, clearly wondering what to make of the large muscular superhero in front of them.
Bob’s eyes panned across them, one to another. He identified tattered US army uniforms on seven of them. They looked physically fit and by and large of optimum combat age. More bodies for the enemy guards’ fire to be distracted by, more bodies for them to aim at and fewer shots directed specifically at him.
[Mission evaluation: success probability increase +1%]
Bob nodded. ‘That is good. With more men, probability of mission success increases.’
A softly taken gasp rippled around the campfire at the timbre of his deep rumbling voice, a commanding sound.
One of the men, a young corporal, turned to Panelli. ‘Can… can I ask him, ask Captain Bob a question?’
Panelli gave it some thought, then nodded reluctantly. ‘Just one, OK? The hero needs his rest, needs to be thinking about our raid tomorrow.’
The young man swallowed nervously. ‘Excuse me, s-sir?’
Bob’s steel-grey eyes slowly swivelled towards him.
‘Word’s been spreadin’ across the state… you’re some kinda superman, can be shot over and over, an’ never die.’
Bob stared at him silently, his face devoid of any emoti
on or reaction.
The young man’s lips twitched anxiously. ‘I’m… I’m a… I believe in the Good Lord, and –’
‘Well, that’s great, son,’ said Panelli, ‘but the captain’s got better things to do than listen to your Bible-thumping.’
‘I gotta ask you, Captain Bob,’ the young corporal interrupted, ‘did God send you to save us, sir?’
Bob’s silicon mind momentarily suspended work on an array of mission assessment calculations to deal with the curious question posed by the young man. His computer offered a list of the most appropriate replies to the question.
The fire crackled noisily in the silence. Far away through the trees an owl hooted, as if urging Bob to hurry up and say something appropriate.
He picked a biblical quotation from his database that seemed to have the most relevance at this moment.
‘When trouble comes, the Lord is a strong refuge. He will sweep away His enemies in an overwhelming flood,’ he replied, his deep voice like a roll of thunder. Bob wasn’t entirely sure what the words meant, but it seemed to have a suitable effect on the men gathered around the campfire.
‘Amen,’ someone muttered after a while.
CHAPTER 57
2001, New York subway
Foster’s torch probed the darkness of the subway station. The beam picked out the glint of twin metal rail tracks to their left over the edge of the platform and the glimmer of pools of stagnant water between them.
Further along the tracks Sal could see an old pram lying on its side, half in, half out of the water.
They could hear skittering sounds along the rails, in, around and under the rotting wooden sleepers; the pattering of little vermin feet and the steady metronome-like drip, drip, drip of moisture from the curved tunnel roof above them echoed through the station.
Along the tiled walls of the station’s platform Sal was fascinated by long-faded advertisement billboards. She passed by the faded image of a happy family gathered around a traditional oak kitchen table, all smiling, with well-scrubbed rosy cheeks, enjoying all the pleasures a tin of Colonel Johnston’s Oatmeal Cookies could offer.
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