Ship of the Damned

by James F. David

  “Just what were you planning to do once you find the Nimitz?” Kellum asked, carefully keeping information from Jett.

  “We’re a scouting party. We are to locate and report.”

  As he spoke, Jett realized that their second signal laser had been destroyed when Thompson was burned. Now the only way to inform Rainbow about the Nimitz was to return through the barrier.

  “And when you make your report, what will the government do? Send in troops to retake their aircraft carrier? And if they can recapture the Nimitz, then how will they get it back to the world?”

  Using marines was exactly what Jett expected, but somehow they needed to find a way to get the Nimitz home. Kellum might be the key to making that happen.

  “If you help get the Nimitz back, I’m sure you and the others here would be welcomed back, too,” Jett said, trying to sound sincere. “It would be a show of good faith.”

  “You can all come to my house if you want,” Ralph offered.

  “Either you’re lying or you’ve been duped,” Kellum said. “They’ve kept us trapped in here for more than fifty years, and now you expect us to believe they would welcome us home?”

  “Times have changed,” Jett said.

  Kellum circled the model ship with his hand.

  “There are two resonant magnetic fields surrounding the Norfolk. The inner field flows from the synchronized magnetic pulse generators I created. We call the inner field the amniotic field since it contains us just like the amniotic membrane contains a fetus in its mother’s womb. The outer field—the chorionic field—is generated by an outside source. I assume you know by whom, since they got you inside. They could drop that field any time they wanted.”

  “The outer field is purely defensive,” Jett said. “Those that have gotten out have harmed innocent people.”

  “My people were killed because they were different, not dangerous. Besides, not all of us have developed unusual abilities.”

  Jett knew that those who escaped were all considered to have psi abilities and were killed as soon and as efficiently as possible. The policy was based on experience. The first Specials who emerged from Pot of Gold had killed many. Impressed, the military had tried to control them, to use them as weapons, but the Specials proved uncontrollable. The early escapees were insane, and Jett knew a powerful telekinetic had killed most of the scientists assigned to the early project. It was that early experience, and fear of living in a world where a select few have psi powers, that had sealed the fate of the men on the ship and brought the Office of Special Projects into existence.

  “The Specials who got out were dangerous,” Jett said, regretting using the word “Special.”

  “Then why would we be welcome on the outside now?” Kellum said.

  The men and women packed into the machine shop murmured, then quickly grew still, waiting to hear Jett’s reply.

  “For one thing, you seem to have found the key to extending the life-span. You haven’t aged a bit,” Jett said.

  Dr. Kellum paused, knowing that Jett was stalling, but then straightened his glasses, pushed the wisps of hair higher on his forehead, and said, “The words ‘day,’ ‘night,’ ‘week,’ or ‘year’ have no meaning here. If outsiders didn’t occasionally stumble across an opening to the Norfolk, we wouldn’t have any sense that time has passed at all.”

  “People get in?” Jett probed.

  “That’s where the women and children came from, and some of the men too. Their stories are all the same; out walking or playing and the next thing they know they’re on the Norfolk.” Motioning to the woman in the waitress uniform, Dr. Kellum said, “Tell him how you got here, Peggy.”

  Peggy was a teenager, pimples dotting the chin of her pretty face. As a child her hair must have been blonde, but it was darker now, with blonde highlights; slivers of her childhood.

  “My boyfriend picked me up from work,” Peggy said with a deep Texas accent.

  Jett saw that she still wore a Denny’s name tag that said, “My name is Peggy.”

  “We were fighting—he didn’t like the way I was with the customers. He thought I was coming on to them, but I only did it for the tips. Blondes get bigger tips, and if you’re friendly you can make a lot. He started yelling, and I yelled back, and he yelled some more. Then I just told him to stop that truck of his and let me out.”

  Now Peggy looked far away as if it was happening to her again.

  “I started walking down the road, and he followed me, hollering at me to get back in the truck. He wouldn’t leave me alone, so I crossed the highway and started cutting across a field. It wasn’t nothing special, just sage. He got out and came after me and grabbed my arm. I got loose and started off again. He kept coming after me, cutting me off, herding me this way and that like I was some yearling calf. Finally, I had enough and took off running. He chased me, and I started zig-zagging to get away, and then suddenly I was here.”

  “Tell him when it happened,” Dr. Kellum said.

  “It was June 6, 1984,” Peggy said. “I guess Zach is a married man now with kids as old as me,” she added sadly.

  Jett didn’t say it, but he thought it possible that Zach was doing time for the murder of his girlfriend. They had left a restaurant together fighting, and she had disappeared without a trace. A jealous boyfriend would be a prime suspect, and Texans liked their crimes solved.

  “See Bobby back there, hiding behind Wilma?” Dr. Kellum said, indicating the oldest boy standing behind the woman with the seamed nylons. “He was chasing a butterfly around his backyard and ended up in the engine room on level thirty-two. He was there a long time before we found that level. A man named Kennedy was president when Bobby showed up, and he says he remembers seeing a debate between President Kennedy and a man named Nixon on television. I worked on the development of television and I knew then it would become a great civics tool.”

  Then Dr. Kellum smiled in a sad way.

  “I’d love to see television. Peggy said it’s in color now.”

  He acted as if he wanted Jett to describe the state of modern broadcasting, but Jett had no desire to regale him with the marvels of high-definition reception or digital satellite broadcasting. He had a mission to complete, and needed to find a way to get on with it.

  “The amniotic field convoluted time and space, which created the different levels of time on the ship,” Dr. Kellum continued. “The field is porous, however, and there are holes. Your chorionic field seals most of those holes, but there are routes in and out. Peggy, Marge, Sarah, Bobby, and the others all stumbled across an entrance.”

  Jett knew that the technicians at Rainbow actively worked at keeping the Specials inside Pot of Gold. Impending escapes were preceded by power fluctuations that slowly built, indicating the general geographic area where the escape would take place—all within a few thousand miles of Philadelphia. Jett hadn’t known about people finding their way into Pot of Gold, but of course that wouldn’t concern Woolman.

  “Occasionally, some of our people disappear,” Dr. Kellum said. “We know they found a way out, but they never come back. But there is order to the universe, so the twists and turns of time and space inside the Norfolk can be understood. There must be a pattern!” he insisted, indicating the ship model in front of him. “That’s what this is for.”

  “That’s neat, Walter,” Ralph said with a mouth full of gum. “Did you make it yourself?”

  Dr. Kellum’s thick glasses magnified his eyes, giving him an owlish appearance.

  “We built it, Ralph,” Dr. Kellum said, sweeping his hand to include the men and women gathered in the room. “We’ve all worked on it. You see, it isn’t really a model; it’s actually a three-dimensional map.”

  Ralph’s eyes glazed over as he looked at the ship. Even his jaws stopped in mid chew.

  Jett looked at the multicolored wiring that made up the guts of the ship and traced a yellow wire that went up and down and all around through the ship. If it was a map he would never be a
ble to follow it.

  Dr. Kellum pointed at a silver disk soldered to the end of a red wire on the deck near the stern.

  “That’s level twelve, where you entered,” Dr. Kellum said, “but we can’t get out that way because your people have it sealed, and even if we did get out we would be killed.”

  “So we must be here,” Jett said, pointing at a white wire that wound deep into the ship.

  Dr. Kellum ignored him, his owl eyes focussed on the ship. “We know of two other unsealed exits,” he said, pointing to other disks soldered to the ends of wire, “but they don’t go anywhere, or go somewhere we don’t want to go. There are other exits out there, I’m sure of it.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Jett asked.

  “Why? Because you’re one of us now. There’s no way out for you or Ralph, or any of the others. They sent you on a suicide mission, Nathan Jett.”

  Dr. Kellum waited for Jett to respond, but he didn’t. Jett did have a way out, but he wouldn’t share it. Instead, he played along to gain Kellum’s confidence.

  “Did they tell you how we got here?” Dr. Kellum asked.

  “I know some of the story,” Jett said.

  “I’m not sure anyone on the outside knows the whole story. I’m not sure I fully understand it, and I created this place.”

  Dr. Kellum waved his hand over his head as he talked. He was an animated man, using his hands as well as his voice to communicate.

  “We didn’t understand what we were creating when we began. We hoped that by creating an intense magnetic field we could bend light around a ship, making it invisible—a decided military advantage. Our first experiment was with a destroyer escort, the USS Eldridge. We fit her with Navy degaussers specially designed to pulse. Pulsing the degaussers in tandem created resonance, exponentially increasing the power of the combined magnetic field. The first experiment took place in Philadelphia, and I watched from the dock as the ship was slowly surrounded by a green glow. As the generators came up to power, the light got brighter and our hair stood on end. Then the Eldridge shimmered and disappeared right before our eyes. A few seconds later it was back.

  “Later we heard reports that the ship was sighted off the coast of Virginia at the same time it had disappeared in Philadelphia, but we laughed them off. We shouldn’t have. Given that first success, the Office of Naval Research made our project high priority, just below the Manhattan Project. We received funding for a full-scale test and were given another ship. The cruiser Norfolk was turned over to us for a few weeks of experimentation. She was fresh out of the Philadelphia Shipyard and ready for sea trials. Dr. Einstein and I had worked out the original pulse rates and frequencies, and now we refined these to increase the intensity of the field.

  “The second-generation magnetic field generators had ten times the power of those used on the Eldridge. We took the Norfolk thirty miles offshore and then slowly brought the generators up to full power. It happened just like with the Eldridge—the green glow, the slow build-up of static electricity—but this time I was on the ship and felt the full force of the charge. The static build-up was so intense, I almost stopped the experiment, but suddenly the static was gone. Then it happened. The ship shuddered, and then the outside world faded away and was replaced by the opaque field you see all around the ship. We found ourselves in a desert—here—and a hundred yards in all directions there was nothing. Only then did we begin to understand what we had created.

  “You see, the magnetic field we created was modified by the steel of the ship—thirteen thousand tons of it. If only we hadn’t used a ship,” Dr. Kellum said, shaking his head. “The field was distorted, flowing up and down the corridors, twisting time and space. There are two poles now—one astern, the other forward of the bow. This distortion created the different levels of time you have experienced. You see, as you travel through the ship you are really travelling through different moments in time. That’s why you seem to have multiple ships. Think of it this way: right now you exist in this second, and then this one, and then this one. If you could travel back a second, you would see yourself as you were a second ago.”

  “Time travel,” Jett said.

  “Of a limited sort,” Dr. Kellum said. “Different moments in time are fixed for the ship and exist in parallel rather than in series, which is how we normally experience time. Since these moments are parallel, we can move between them. Right now we are in this machine shop at this moment. Walk through the ship until you are on another time level, and it’s a different moment in the same machine shop. It’s the same all over the ship, with different moments of time frozen and parallel. The only exception is the boiler room where we installed the generators. Those generators are the nexus for the field and they exist at only one moment in time.”

  “What about the men that are part of the ship and standing in the corridors?” Jett asked.

  “The field affects each of us differently,” Dr. Kellum said sadly. “Unfortunately, for some of the men there was a lag as the field took hold of them. When it finally did, they occupied space the ship had moved to and they merged with the ship, the men and the structure of the ship occupying the same space but at two different moments. Those men and the ones in the corridors have simply stopped moving with time at all.”

  “You must have tried to turn off the generators,” Jett said.

  “Not immediately. You see, we took the Norfolk out with a third of her normal complement—five hundred men. Some of those disappeared as the field reached full strength, and a hundred more merged with the ship. We didn’t want to turn off the field until we understood what had happened. By the time we lost hope of saving them, the paranormal abilities had emerged, and Chief McNab began to prophesize and preach. By the time we discovered his ability to control the minds of others it was too late. Many of the crew were already fanatic followers. The judgement of God, he said. Maybe it was. More and more men went over to his side. I knew we were losing control, so I ordered the power lines to the generators cut—it made no difference; the generators continued to run. Everything continued to run. You see the lights burning all over the ship? The power lines were cut long ago, yet they still burn. Wherever this place is,” Dr. Kellum said, gesturing with his arms again, “provides its own power. It also sustains us. We don’t eat or drink, yet our bodies are replenished.”

  “How do you explain that?” Jett asked.

  “Do you know the second law of thermodynamics?” Dr. Kellum said.

  “It’s entropy; the tendency for systems to move from order to disorder.”

  “It’s more than a tendency, it’s written into the fabric of the universe—it’s a law. But given that law, then how did order come to exist in the universe in the first place? Why do galaxies and planetary systems form, or for that matter, why did our own atoms organize into molecules, the molecules into cells, and the cells into complex biological systems? And given the fact of entropy, why doesn’t a system move from order to disorder instantly? Why does it take time at all, and why do some systems exist for eons with little decay?”

  “A force that counters entropy?” Jett suggested.

  “Very good,” Dr. Kellum said. “Think of that force as anti-entropy. With our experiment we intended to bend light, and we succeeded beyond expectations, but I believe we did more. We pushed ourselves into the substrate of the universe—slipped between the layers, so to speak—into a region where the anti-entropy force is strong and entropy is weak. This ship and the people on it are maintained by this force, a force as fundamental as gravity.”

  Jett wasn’t a theoretician, but he connected Dr. Kellum’s theory to what had happened to time itself. With no entropy—no deteriorization—there was little or no passage of time. It stood to reason that if another little pocket like Pot of Gold could be created in a layer of the universe where entropy dominates, decay would be virtually instantaneous, and time would literally fly by.

  “With McNab proselytizing among the men and turning them against
the officers, we had only one course left to us. We decided to cut through one of the steel casings and destroy the generator coils, but McNab mutinied when he found out. He was too powerful by then, and we couldn’t stop him. Most of the others died, and he drove us out of level one. He has controlled the generators ever since.”

  “So it was McNab that pulled the Nimitz inside?” Jett said, probing for information again.

  “McNab is a very ordinary man with an extraordinary ability to manipulate those around him. He can’t begin to fathom the complexities of magnetic resonance and its relation to gravitational fields.”

  “If he didn’t pull the Nimitz inside, then who did? Or is it here at all?”

  Again Dr. Kellum avoided discussing the Nimitz, holding back information. Jett was sure that Dr. Kellum was hiding something important.

  Now pointing at the ship with the wires inside, Dr. Kellum said, “There is a pattern, and when I have discovered it, we will all go home.”

  Dr. Kellum’s followers erupted in cheers, bringing Ralph out of his trance.

  “Your toy ship map isn’t right, Walter,” Ralph said. “You want I should fix it for you?”

  Dr. Kellum smiled at Ralph, the happy wrinkles around his eyes magnified by his thick glasses.

  “Thanks, Ralph, but we’ve been working on it a long time. A very long time.”

  “Sure, sure. I understand. You think I might break it or something, but I won’t. I could fix it for you in a jiff. See where that yellow striped one goes down in there? Well it should go up one before it goes down. And where you got that little cap thing on the orange wire—that means dead end, right?—it doesn’t end there.”

  Ralph started to reach into the model, but Dr. Kellum grabbed his hand.

  “Please don’t touch it,” Dr. Kellum said.

  “I could fix it,” Ralph said.

  “No,” Dr. Kellum said sternly. Then, more kindly, “What are you wearing around your waist?”

  “It’s how we’re gonna get home again,” Ralph said. “The light on mine’s busted, but I don’t mind. I like it anyways.”