“Why didn’t you put the gate in a vertical orientation so a traveler could walk straight through?”
Von Falkenstein shook his head. “We tried that in the initial experiments, but found that recovering the traveler on the far side was very problematic. Our technology, particularly the computing machine, is not yet so far advanced that we can hold the boundary perfectly stable, and the test subjects sent through the vertical gate often intersected the boundary on the exit side.”
“What happened to them?”
The Herr Professor shrugged. “They died.”
As Peter watched, the pair of men in the upper cage lowered a thin cable through the center of the great ring to another pair of men in the lower cage, which was easily big enough to contain three or four elephants and had steel bars that looked to be as thick as Peter’s forearm. Some of them, it appeared, had been bent out of true and crudely hammered back into line.
Once the men rigging the cable had finished, they cleared the catwalks.
“We are ready, Herr Professor,” Hoth announced.
“Excellent!” Von Falkenstein rubbed his hands together.
“Here, Peter.” Baumann handed him a set of dark goggles. “You’ll need these.”
Peter nodded his head in thanks as he took them.
Turning back to the ring, Peter caught Mina’s gaze. She gave a slight nod, her lips compressed into a thin line.
“Hoth,” von Falkenstein ordered, “begin the sequence.”
“Jawohl!”
Hoth began issuing instructions to his controllers. A low hum rose from the sub audible range to fill the chamber. “Power at fifteen percent,” Hoth reported. “Twenty-five…thirty…”
The hair on the back of Peter’s neck stood on end and a chill ran down his spine, but it was more than an emotional reaction. He could sense the enormous electrical potential building in the cavern as the hum grew louder.
“Forty percent…Fifty!” Hoth checked with several of the controllers. “Power holding steady at fifty percent!”
Von Falkenstein nodded. “Initiate stage two!”
“Goggles!” Hoth ordered. “Now!”
Everyone pulled the goggles down over their eyes. They were like welding goggles, far darker than sunglasses. Even with the brilliant lighting in the cavern, Peter could barely see a thing.
The hum grew into a low roar that penetrated his bones, the low frequency vibrations setting his teeth on edge.
Hoth continued his count as the controllers fed more power to the ring. “Sixty percent…seventy-five…eighty-five…”
The natural golden hue of the ring began to grow brighter, as if the metal was being heated from within, but the temperature in the cavern remained cool.
“Ninety-five…one-hundred percent!” Hoth had to shout to be heard over the roar. “Power holding steady!”
“Phase three!” Von Falkenstein bellowed.
By this time the ring was blazing so bright that it was painful to look at. Even waring the goggles, Peter had to squint.
“Stand by,” Hoth warned. “Now!”
Peter jumped back in surprise as thousands of electric bolts exploded from the inner edge of the ring, the deafening shockwaves rebounding through the cavern. The entire interior diameter of the ring was filled with a raging sea of cyan lightning.
“Phase four!” Von Falkenstein cried, signaling to Hoth with a slashing chop of his hand.
Hoth nodded, then bent to his own console and pressed an unimpressive looking button.
With a tremendous boom, the bolts stopped dancing in random patterns around the ring. Instead, they were drawn to the exact center, pinned there as if against their will by some unimaginable force. The point where they intersected was so bright that Peter’s eyes were tearing up. He raised his hands to his face and peered through the tiny gap he made with his fingers.
The convergence of the ring’s energy became a tiny star that began to grow, expanding faster and faster.
In the final instant before it reached the edge of the ring, Peter felt as if gravity had suddenly surged, making him feel far heavier than he normally did, drawing him toward the glowing ball at the center of the ring. Gripped by a sense of panic every bit as real as this strange gravitational surge, he latched on to the railing around the platform to keep from being drawn into the maelstrom.
With another even louder explosion, the artificial sun vanished, as did the gravitational anomaly. All Peter could see through the goggles was the ring, glowing a steady white. The storm of sound had passed, leaving behind only a deep hum that throbbed in a slow rhythm.
“The gate is stable,” Hoth said in a rasping voice. “You may remove your goggles.”
Peter warily pushed the goggles up to his forehead, and his jaw dropped open at what he saw below him.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?” Von Falkenstein said quietly beside him.
Inside the superconducting ring Peter could see…nothing. Absolutely nothing. In contrast to the steady white glow of the ring itself, the circle the ring defined was now blacker than black, a darkness deeper and more impenetrable than a dark sky bereft of the moon and with all the stars extinguished. As Peter stared, he saw not the faintest shimmer or ripple. “The ring defines a Schwartzchild radius,” he whispered.
His voice must have been loud enough for von Falkenstein to hear. “Exactly so. In theory, the radius would typically apply to a spherically symmetric body and would be shaped as such, but the ring allows us to collapse it into what we perceive as two dimensions. It appears black, of course, because any light that would normally reflect from the surface cannot escape once it has intersected the Schwartzchild radius.”
The guide cable, Peter saw, remained taut where it passed through the precise center of the black disk.
“While you cannot see it from here,” von Falkenstein observed, “the cable remains fixed and taut where it is anchored to the receiving cage.”
“Incredible,” Peter breathed. A sudden shiver ran through him, but it was not born of fear. He was gripped with an inescapable sense of wonder that he hadn’t felt since he was a young boy, his imagination captivated by one of his father’s many impossible stories. Here you stand, Peter thought, at the doorway to a portal through space and time. This was no dream, no elaborate parlor trick. What Einstein and Rosen had only theorized, von Falkenstein had made real. Peter stood there, awestruck, witness to the greatest technical achievement in mankind’s history, far eclipsing every accomplishment since primitive humans had learned the secret of making fire.
“Hoth,” von Falkenstein demanded, interrupting Peter’s reverie, “how long?”
“Fifty-six seconds,” Hoth reported. “Holding steady.”
“In the tests conducted since our problems with sabotage,” von Falkenstein said with an irritated glance at Baumann, who was staring at the gate, “we’ve only been able to hold the aperture open for a maximum of seventy-two seconds before the computer fails and the gate collapses.”
Peter watched the large timer at Hoth’s console. The hand counting the seconds swept past the twelve o’clock position and the minute hand moved to one. He could sense von Falkenstein’s tension mounting as the second hand moved past two, then three.
At the two minute mark, Hoth said, “Two minutes, and the gate remains steady.” He favored Peter with the trace of a smile and a nod.
Von Falkenstein clapped Peter on the back. “Very good, Peter! Very good!”
“How long do you plan to hold it open?” Peter asked. “Now that I think of it, how long does it need to be open for a traveler to make the journey?”
“The time a traveler takes is always exactly one-hundred twenty-three point seven eight seconds, regardless of the coordinates programmed into the gate. We have never measured a variance of more than a thousandth of a second.” He looked down at the main mission timer. “Once the gate has reached one hundred and eighty seconds, Hoth will shut it down. That aspect of its operation is far less interesti
ng. The Schwartzchild radius simply disappears with a bang.”
Gazing into the abyss, Peter asked, “If I were to follow the cable, to travel through the gate right now, where would I find myself?”
Von Falkenstein chuckled. “Why, deep in the bowels of Hell, of course.”
“And that’s just where you’re about to go,” Baumann said with a malicious twist of his lips. “I’m taking you down to Level Three.”
LEVEL THREE
Peter felt his pulse quicken as the elevator smoothly dropped with vertigo inducing speed from Level Two, descending even deeper into the earth.
Beside him, Baumann asked, “Have you ever read Alice im Wunderland?”
Alice in Wonderland, Peter thought. “Yes, sir, although it was a long time ago.”
“It’s a wonderful story, don’t you think?” He grinned, his white teeth flashing in the dim light of the elevator. “Think of yourself as Alice, and this,” he gestured with his hands, indicating the elevator shaft, “is the rabbit hole. You probably thought the Black Gate was the bottom of the hole, that nothing more fantastical was possible. If so, you were quite wrong.”
As the elevator slowed to a stop, Peter guessed that they had traveled at least another hundred meters from the bottom of the Level Two cavern. Even before the doors opened he heard something, faint traces of cries and grunts, bestial squeals. The sounds made his skin crawl.
The enlisted man who operated the elevator opened the door and stood aside as Baumann led Peter out. Peter couldn’t miss the sideways look the man sent through the door, and saw the tremor that gripped his hands.
They stepped into a corridor of rough-hewn rock. The entrance was guarded by an entire squad of SS soldiers. Unlike the others Peter had seen in the facility, who were required to wear their black uniforms, these men were in full combat dress, wearing camouflage uniforms, ammunition bandoliers for the assault rifles they carried, and long-handled “potato masher” grenades stuck in the tops of their boots. In a rack on one wall hung a trio of flamethrowers, while a rack on the opposite side held half a dozen Panzerfaust anti-tank rockets. In the center of the corridor, which had been widened near the elevator to form a sort of vestibule, was a sandbagged and armor plated pillbox with an MG-42 machine-gun pointed down the length of the corridor.
“Are we expecting the Russians to tunnel through from Moscow?” Peter asked.
A few of the guards looked over at him, but clearly none thought the quip humorous. Most guards Peter had encountered during the war had been bored at their duty, attentive but never truly expecting anything to happen on their watch. These men, by contrast, were tense, their attention focused on the corridor, and something told him it wasn’t merely to put on a show for himself and Baumann.
Baumann asked the squad leader, “All is quiet, I trust?”
“Yes, sir,” the man, a senior sergeant who wore the Iron Cross, said. Then, in a lower voice he added, “As quiet as it ever gets down here.”
“Very good.” To Peter, Baumann said, “Come along, Hauptsturmführer. Let me show you what all the fuss is about.”
The animal sounds grew louder as Peter limped down the corridor beside Baumann. But something in Peter’s brain told him they weren’t exactly animal sounds. They were bestial in nature, but not quite like any he had ever heard before. The closest to being recognizable was a low grunting that sounded much like a gorilla, but was still different enough to his ear to discomfit him.
The corridor ended at a T junction, where Baumann turned right.
Rounding the corner with him, Peter found himself standing before a steel door more massive than any he might have imagined in the world’s largest banks. A similar door was located a short distance down the other direction of the junction. He also noticed that the vault door on the right side wasn’t the original. Concrete patches to the floor and around the circumference of the tunnel were clear evidence that some earlier version of the door had been removed.
“That door would take you into a large service tunnel that leads up to the cavern,” Baumann said, nodding in the direction of the door to the left side of the T junction. “We originally needed a tunnel to bring down the materials from the rail siding through the cavern to build the cells in here, but then had to enlarge it to accommodate some of our test subjects.”
Peter tried to get his mind around Baumann’s last words. The vault door before them was easily large enough to accommodate a pair of elephants walking side by side. He opened his mouth to ask a question, then snapped it shut again, afraid of looking a fool.
A combination lock dominated the lower right quarter of the door, and Baumann spun it left and right. He made no attempt to block Peter’s view, and Peter carefully noted the numbers, filing the information away should he need it later.
Baumann spun a spoked wheel as large across as Peter’s arm span, and the door began to swing open with an accompanying hum of hydraulics.
The sound level instantly rose to a dull roar that reverberated down the rock-walled corridor.
“Don’t dawdle, Peter!” Baumann called as he stepped over the threshold. “The door must never be left open an instant longer than necessary. Believe it or not, we’ve had a few leakers.”
“Leakers?” Peter asked as he stepped through.
“That’s what we call the ones that have escaped. Not many have gotten past us, mind you, but every zoo has at least one escape artist.”
They were received by another guard detail, more SS men in combat gear. If the ones near the elevator were on edge, these men were little less than terrified.
As the senior man on duty slapped a large button beside the door to close it while another soldier stood ready to spin the bolts closed, Peter flinched as a basso profundo bellow echoed from up ahead, followed by a boom that shook the floor.
“He’s been doing that all morning, sir,” the squad leader reported, licking his lips.
“Of course he has,” Baumann said in a matter of fact tone. “He’s hungry.” Looking at his watch, he added, “Don’t fret, Hauptscharführer. His dinner should be on the way soon.”
“As you say, sir.” The sergeant’s face paled.
Baumann nodded in the direction of the long corridor before them. “This way, Peter.”
“If I may ask, sir, who is this person you were speaking of? The one who’s hungry?”
“I have no idea what his real name is. We just call him Ivan. He was a Russian prisoner. I’m not sure what you’d call him now.”
Baumann led him through several twists and turns to what Peter took to be a medical laboratory that formed a hub, with five more corridors radiating outward like spokes. The hub itself was perhaps fifty yards across. Large work tables, festooned with everything from racks of test tubes and beakers to electrical equipment cluttered with dials and buttons, were arrayed in orderly rows. A dozen or more men in white lab coats, with a few women acting as assistants, were hard at work. Some looked up briefly, but quickly returned to whatever they were doing. Unlike the soldiers, they seemed undistracted by the zoo-like cacophony.
Along the circumference of the main room was a series of examining or operating rooms with glass windows so that the goings-on inside could be observed by those in the central laboratory area. The glass, he noted, wasn’t what one might find in the average window. It was armor glass like that found in the vision blocks of tanks, the thinnest of which Peter judged to be at least two inches thick.
“Ah, Herr Standartenführer.” A tall, cadaverous man with thick spectacles and thinning white hair shambled toward them from one of the examining rooms. He wore a heavy leather apron over a white lab coat and rubber gloves. Spatters on the apron and gloves glistened crimson in the harsh overhead lights.
“Peter,” Baumann said, “may I introduce Herr Doktor Hermann Kleist, our research director. Herr Doktor, this is Hauptsturmführer Peter Müller, my new second in command.”
Peter snapped his heels together and bowed his head slightly, resisting
the conditioned urge to reach out to shake the man’s hand.
“My pleasure, of course,” Kleist said with an amiable smile. “I had heard, of course, of your arrival.”
“I’m surprised, sir,” Peter said, “that I didn’t have the chance to meet you last night at dinner with the Herr Professor.”
An expression of stark rage passed over Kleist’s face so quickly that Peter would have missed it had he so much as blinked, but there was no mistaking it.
“The good doctor’s work keeps him down here most of the time,” Baumann said smoothly as Kleist regained his composure.
The doctor made a coughing sound that Peter realized was actually laughter. “Why don’t you just tell him?” He looked at Peter, his eyes magnified by his glasses to twice their natural size. “The good Herr Professor sees us as nothing more than swineherds,” he said, sarcasm dripping from his voice like the drops of blood that fell from his gloves to the floor at his feet. “He sits in his high tower, admiring his own brilliance in creating the gate, when it is we who truly make the Führer’s dream possible!”
“Come, come, Kleist,” Baumann said. “It’s not like you’ve never been to one of the good professor’s dinner parties. And you must admit that you do spend most of your time down here of your own accord.”
“Yes, that is true, but he could still…”
The conversation faded from Peter’s hearing as his eyes fastened onto a set of glass jars, dozens of them, arrayed on a long set of shelves along the circular wall of the lab. As if he was being drawn by a magnet, he found himself moving closer to them as Baumann and Kleist prattled on. Some of the jars were small, no larger than pickle jars, while four were as large as fifty-five gallon drums, with every other imaginable size in between.
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