Ship of the Damned

by James F. David

  “Call me at the university,” Elizabeth said, then hung up and lay back, eyes closing. She couldn’t sleep. After twenty minutes she forced herself out of bed and dressed.

  DIRECTION

  Robert Daly sat at his desk in the Kellum Foundation headquarters. A grant application was spread out in front of him. His glass-topped desk had no drawer to store pencils, pens, erasers, and paper clips, no place to hold files or stickies, no hiding place for his scissors, calculator, or stapler. All of those were tucked away in the credenza behind him. Just last week he had owned a real desk with drawers; a great mahogany desk with the surface area of a small aircraft carrier. Even with his computer, pencil holder, phone, desk calendar, Rolodex, and stacks of folders, there was still room to work. Now that desk was gone, broken into pieces to get it through his door. He was sad to see his old friend go, and dismayed when he saw his new desk.

  The replacement desk was more than just a desk; it was a work of art designed and built by his son the artist. It was the only commission his son had received last year, given to him by his mother. Smiling graciously, Daly had accepted the gift and tolerated the parade of potential customers his wife had ushered through his office. There were no new commissions. Daly was in a position of power and was used to obsequious supplicants fawning over him, but no one was so desperate for Daly’s favor as to buy one of his son’s ugly, nonfunctional desks. Knowing that family harmony depended on his response, he praised the desk. To his horror, his wife believed him and soon commissioned matching office furniture.

  The grant application on his desk was typical of what the Kellum Foundation funded. The applicant had been working at a major university on grant money, but his grant had not been renewed. The researcher had been experimenting with a new approach to producing nuclear fusion. To produce fusion, two hydrogen atoms need to be combined, creating one helium atom and releasing the excess energy. Instead of using particle accelerators to reach the energy level necessary for the fusion to occur, the researcher had been experimenting with polarized electric fields to compress matter to the densities necessary for fusion. He had never achieved fusion, but had stumbled across an anomaly he thought more interesting. He found that electrons fired near the compressed mass arrived before they had been released. Professional colleagues called the result spurious, but he was convinced that the electrons were travelling back in time.

  With his grant running out, the researcher was desperately seeking alternative funding. Daly would send the application to the staff for scientific evaluation, but it was likely to be funded. It fit with the foundation’s overall goal—in fact, almost everything did.

  Daly’s phone buzzed and he reflexively reached across his desk. There was no phone there. Anything on the desk “detracted from what the piece was trying to say,” his son had insisted. Turning to the phone behind him, he punched his secretary’s line.

  “Mr. Daly, we’re getting Internet hits on the web sites you were interested in.”

  “From Doctor Birnbaum?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you,” Daly said, hanging up. Shifting to his computer he accessed the Internet and opened his search engine. He had the sites marked and found Dr. Birnbaum’s inquiry on the second bulletin board he checked. He had spent an hour carefully wording his reply, knowing that Dr. Birnbaum would pass it on to Dr. Martin. He decided not to mention the disappearance of the Nimitz. Dr. Martin and his people didn’t need to know about the Nimitz, since they weren’t ready yet to make the connection with the ship dream.

  After reading Dr. Birnbaum’s message, Daly found that his preworded reply needed only slight modifications. Then Daly clicked on “send” and sat back. Dr. Martin and Ms. Foxworth were close to where he wanted them to be, and the information he had just sent should get them even closer.

  NORFOLK

  Elizabeth sipped her third cup of coffee. Normally a single cup of coffee woke her up in the morning, but not today. Wes came in, looking at her with concern.

  “You don’t look well,” Wes said.

  “Good morning to you too,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay, Wes. I didn’t sleep well,” Elizabeth said.

  Wes waited for her to explain.

  “I had the dream last night,” she went on. “I was on the ship again.”

  Wes collapsed onto the one chair in her small, neat office.

  “Somehow I made you receptive to the dream,” Wes said. “I never should have put you in the dream again.”

  “I insisted, Wes. No one knew this would happen.”

  “I shouldn’t have taken the chance.”

  “Wes, look at this the other way. If linking with the dreamers made me a receiver, then maybe we could link each of the dreamers with nonreceivers and stop them from dreaming of the ship.”

  “We can try that,” Wes said.

  Wes accepted the idea too quickly, and she knew there was little chance it would work. An uncomfortable silence followed. Elizabeth realized that like Margi and Anita, she would only stop dreaming of the ship when she stopped dreaming forever.

  The phone rang. Elizabeth answered, then punched the speaker phone.

  “It’s Doctor Birnbaum. He knows something about the ship. Can you hear us, Dr. Birnbaum?”

  “Yes. Is that Wes with you? Good, he needs to hear this too. I tracked down your ship, the CA 137. It’s a World War II vintage Baltimore class, heavy cruiser. It was to be named the Norfolk but according to the Navy the ship was never built.”

  “So there is no such ship,” Wes said.

  “Not officially,” Birnbaum said. “Other sources say it was indeed built at the Philadelphia Naval Yard and launched for sea trials in 1943.”

  “So why would the Navy lie about it?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Have you ever heard of the Philadelphia Experiment?” Dr. Birnbaum said.

  “No,” said Wes.

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth.

  “It’s a World War II secret government project that has achieved nearly the same level of notoriety as the UFO crash at Roswell.”

  “Urban myth?” Wes said.

  “There is a nugget of truth at the core of most myths, Wes,” Dr. Birnbaum said. “The Philadelphia Experiment began with the DE 173, the USS Eldridge. The Navy was experimenting with electronic camouflage, trying to find a way to make its ships invisible. The Eldridge was fitted with specially modified naval-type degaussers—basically a magnetic field generator. The generators were rigged to pulse, rather than generate a constant field. They found they could increase the strength of the magnetic field exponentially if they pulsed the generators at resonant frequencies. They believed the intense magnetic field would bend light, making the ship invisible.”

  “Is that possible?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I don’t see how,” Wes said. “Only matter as dense as a black hole can warp light.”

  “I would have agreed with you yesterday,” Dr. Birnbaum said, “but then I learned the experiment was conducted by the Navy Office of Scientific Research in August 1943 and that Albert Einstein was a consultant to that office between May 1943 and June 1944. He primarily worked for the Bureau of Ordnance but some believe he had a hand in the Philadelphia Experiment.”

  “If the experiment had been successful, the Navy would have invisible ships today,” Wes said.

  “Something happened, but not what they expected,” Dr. Birnbaum said. “The Eldridge disappeared all right, but there are rumors the ship was actually transported to Norfolk, Virginia and back again.”

  “Impossible,” Wes said.

  “The Navy publicly denied it,” Dr. Birnbaum said, “but the Navy was so pleased with the initial experiment they funded the creation of larger generators and a second experiment. My source tells me they used the newly launched CA 137, the USS Norfolk for the second one. They took her out to sea with a skeleton crew and powered up the generators. The ship disappeared just as the Eldridge had, but this time
the Norfolk never reappeared. The observation ship carried witnesses who swear the ship just vanished and never returned.”

  “And now it shows up in dreams,” Elizabeth said.

  “There’s more to the myth,” Dr. Birnbaum said. “It gets even stranger. There are reports that a few months after the experiment with the Eldridge, some of her crew—this is going to be hard to believe—became semi-transparent and could move through walls. Some got stuck and became part of the wall.”

  Wes and Elizabeth looked at each other, incredulous.

  “In the dream there were sailors like that, some in the deck,” Elizabeth said.

  “Just like on the Eldridge,” Dr. Birnbaum said. “It seems less and less like myth.”

  There was silence now as Elizabeth and Wes tried to make sense of it all.

  “Dr. Birnbaum, the ship in the dream had airplanes on it, but you say it is a cruiser, not an aircraft carrier,” Wes said.

  “Airplanes? You say there were airplanes on the ship in the dream?” Dr. Birnbaum said.

  “I saw two airplanes,” Elizabeth said.

  “Were they F-14s?” Dr. Birnbaum asked.

  “No, they were antiques—biplanes—and they were mounted on the back of the ship,” Elizabeth said.

  “Those would be scout planes,” Dr. Birnbaum said. “World War II—era cruisers carried as many as four planes and launched them with catapults. They were used mostly for reconnaissance and artillery control. Sometimes they landed at sea and were recovered, sometimes they just let the planes crash because it wasn’t safe to pick them up.”

  “Why did you think they might be F-14s?” Wes said.

  “When I was searching the Internet I came across a chat room where they were talking about the USS Nimitz. There are rumors that the ship has been sunk or blown up, or that it simply disappeared. The only fact that everyone agreed on was that communication with the Nimitz has been cut off.”

  “Could they have revived the Philadelphia Experiment?” Elizabeth asked.

  “They most certainly wouldn’t try it with a supercarrier,” Dr. Birnbaum said.

  The rumors about the Nimitz were an odd coincidence, but the ship Elizabeth and the others had reported from the dream was nothing like an aircraft carrier.

  “The Philadelphia Experiment was fifty years ago,” Wes said.

  “But we’re dreaming about it today,” Elizabeth said, “and we see Ralph on the ship.”

  “It’s too fantastic,” Wes said. “People passing through walls?”

  “Interdimensional shifting?” Dr. Birnbaum suggested. “Perhaps the resonant fields pushed the Eldridge through a dimensional hole and out the other side to Norfolk, and then back. The sailors were somehow changed in the process, perhaps slowly, and months later the full effects were seen?”

  “How does this help us find Ralph?” Elizabeth asked.

  “We need to find the ship,” Dr. Birnbaum said.

  “There might be another way,” Wes said. “I don’t know how to find our way to the ship, but I bet Ralph knows how to find his way home.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Dr. Birnbaum said.

  “I think we should ask Ralph to come home.”

  JOURNEY

  Jett and his team followed the captured sailor through the Norfolk, guns ready, alert for attack. Ralph plodded along behind Jett, distracted by open hatches, connecting corridors, and especially frozen men. Their guide’s course wove them from port to starboard, fore and aft, in and out of the ship, around gun turrets, and through the pilot house and chart rooms. From the deck he led them deep into the bowels of the Norfolk, through crew berths slung with hammocks and to boiler rooms. Huge diesel-fired boilers connected to steam pipes dominated one room; the pipes were designed to carry the steam to the turbines in the engine room. The second identical boiler room was through connecting water-tight doors; it connected to an engine room with its great turbines. On the far side there was another boiler room, but the boilers here were missing. From there they moved to a fourth boiler room and another engine room. Jett knew from studying the design of the Norfolk that the redundancy was by design and not the result of the twisting of space that the field created. However, sometimes compartments did not connect as they should, and instead of the empty boiler room leading to the fourth boiler room, it led to the deck. This kind of space distortion made forming a mental map of their route nearly impossible.

  Twice they emerged in the airplane hangar, a great, empty space designed to store seaplanes like those mounted on the deck above. Once, they passed through the chart room to emerge in a magazine, half filled with shells for the five- and eight-inch guns. Along the twisting, turning route, they encountered men frozen in place or protruding from bulkheads. A set of hands decorated the outside of a forty-millimeter gun turret on one pass, a leg protruded from a boiler on another. Most bizarre of all was a ladder they climbed, which was as much human as it was metal.

  Jett’s briefing on the conditions inside Pot of Gold hadn’t prepared him for something so foreign to human experience. Ralph studied all the frozen men, finding it hard to pass anything so lifelike without introducing himself.

  After hours of following the sailor, Jett called a halt as they emerged from the superstructure. They took cover under a twenty-millimeter gun emplacement at midships. Jett eyed the machine gun, longing to climb into the gun emplacement and feel the steel of the weapon. Guns were the tools of his trade.

  The deck was empty, no frozen men or bodies protruding from bulkheads. They hadn’t seen or heard anyone in pursuit since Thompson was torched. Jett ordered Peters to guard the hatch they had just come through, and told Evans to move down the deck to secure an avenue of escape.

  “Are we getting close to the generators?” Jett said.

  “Closer,” the sailor answered, squatting.

  The sailor was a young man, maybe twenty-five, but he carried himself like someone much older. His generation had fought and won a world war, coming home war-weary and older than their years. Jett understood men like this sailor, since he, too, had taken on adult responsibility in his teens.

  “What’s your name?” Jett asked, squatting next to him.

  Suddenly Ralph’s arm went out and he thumped himself on the side of his head.

  “How could I be so stupid?” Ralph said. “I didn’t get to meet ya!” He thrust out his hand. “I’m Ralph, and this here’s Nate, and this here’s Karla, and this here’s Jim, and that’s Robin over there.”

  “I’m Roger Dawson,” the sailor said, taking Ralph’s hand.

  “Hihowyadoin?” Ralph said. “Got any gum?”

  “I can’t remember the last time I saw a piece of gum.”

  Standing, Jett pulled a pack of Juicy Fruit from a pocket in his silver coveralls and handed it to Ralph.

  “Share it,” Jett said.

  “Juicy Fruit,” Dawson and Ralph said at the same time.

  “How close are we to the generators?” Jett asked again as Dawson unwrapped the stick of gum.

  Getting to his feet, Dawson said, “Did we ever get to Mars? Someone said we flew a rocketship to the moon and that next we were going to go to Mars.”

  “The generators?” Compton said, pushing her gun into Dawson’s side.

  “Men did walk on the moon, but we haven’t gotten to Mars yet,” Jett said.

  “Imagine that,” Dawson said. “Someone actually touched the moon.”

  “The generators?” Compton said, poking Dawson hard enough with her gun barrel to make him wince.

  At five foot seven, Compton was three inches shorter than Dawson and fifty pounds lighter, but she was well conditioned and knew every nerve nexus in the human body. Dawson saw her through his 1940s eyes; women weren’t trained to kill back then. Dressed in her silver suit she looked cute and harmless to him.

  “Stop poking me with that gun, honey, or I’ll take it away from you,” Dawson said.

  Suddenly Compton’s left arm whipped out, striking Dawson acr
oss his chest, the edge of her hand impacting his solar plexus. Dawson’s lungs deflated explosively, and he buckled in half, arms wrapped around his waist.

  “Don’t call me honey,” Compton said. Then she jammed the gun into Dawson’s ear, causing him to wince again. “When you can breathe again, the first words our of your mouth better be about the generators or they’ll be your last.”

  “You didn’t have to hit him,” Ralph said. “It’s not nice to hit people, Karla.”

  Ignoring Ralph, Compton kept the gun pressed against Dawson’s ear. It took a minute for him to get control. of his breathing, and then he waited another minute, either collecting his thoughts or defying Compton—either of which was foolhardy.

  “I’m taking you to where you need to go,” Dawson finally gasped. “There are thirty-two known levels on the Norfolk. We started on level twelve and we’re now on level twenty.”

  “What do you mean ‘levels?’” Jett said.

  “It’s what we call them. I don’t really understand it myself. You need to talk to the Professor.”

  “We don’t need to understand it,” Compton said. “We just need to know how much farther it is.”

  Scared, Dawson avoided eye contact, Compton’s gun still nestled in his ear.

  “What level are the generators on?” Compton asked. “Level twenty-two? Level thirty? I’m running out of patience.”

  “Level one,” Dawson said.

  Compton cursed, her finger tightening on the trigger. Dawson’s lips moved as in prayer.

  “Wait!” Jett ordered Compton. Then he asked Dawson, “Why are you taking us the wrong way?”

  “I’m taking you to the Professor. He can explain it all.”

  “Take us to the generators,” Jett said.

  “We can’t get to them. They have them. They won’t let you anywhere near.

  “Who?” Jett said. “The people who attacked us?”

  Evans came down the deck, listening to the exchange.

  “Yeah. It was them that killed your friend. They protect the generators. They’re all crazy. That’s what we call them, Crazies. They think that machine gives them eternal life—eternal hell if you ask me.”