Bronwyn nodded and offered her hand, ready to leave. Instead of his hand, Jim put a Bible in hers. It was a small one that, she realized instantly, would fit in one of the pockets on her flight suit (or in one of the pockets of the BDUs the ground soldiers wore). Then he took both her hands and the Bible in his and asked, "May I pray for you before you go?"
"I'd like that," she replied out of courtesy, then suddenly realized, somewhat to her surprise, that it was true. As he prayed for her she realized no one had prayed for her since her grandfather and she liked the idea. She wasn't entirely sure what—if any—good it did, but she liked it. So she tried to pay attention the words because wasn't one of the reasons she had come over here in the first place was because she hadn't known how to pray?
"Give up?" Tony finally asked.
"I'm beyond giving up. What I saw—I would say it was a miracle but I'm guessing, based on where we are, that there's a scientific explanation for what I just saw."
"Presicely!" Gustav announced excitedly. "Now come over here for a few minutes of class time, my pupil."
Kerrigan looked at the two marks on the floor still in a quandary, but walked over to where Gustav was standing by a chalk board. Still scratching his head, Kerrigan absently sat down and looked up at the blackboard. "Teach me," he mumbled.
As Gustav wrote "dimensions" on the chalkboard in an amazingly precise script, he asked, "What are the dimensions?"
"Of what?" Kerrigan asked, shaking himself from his stupor.
"Of anything. How do we measure an object?"
Kerrigan glanced at Tony, who was standing to the side, leaning against a post and smiling as if to say, "You're on your own, kid." Kerrigan looked back at Gustav and finally said, "Are you looking for height, width and depth?"
"Exactly," Gustav smiled. When he had written all three dimensions down, he asked, "And what else?"
"Hmm? I'm sorry, I didn't know there were others."
Gustav held up an eraser and said, "If we wish to precisely describe this eraser, we would tell someone that it is what? Three inches wide, by six inches long by, um, one inch thick, no?"
Tossing the eraser to Kerrigan, he asked, "What about now?"
Kerrigan looked down at the eraser and said, with a little bit of confusion, "It's still the same size."
"But it has changed, no? It was over here with me and now it is over there with you. And for a brief moment, it was in between. Were we to have filmed my little toss with a movie camera, we could see several frames of film, each with the eraser in a different spot."
"Yeah," Kerrigan nodded slowly. "But I still don't get what you're driving at."
Gustav wrote on the board, "movement." He turned to Kerrigan and said, "The fourth dimension is movement. We live on a planet which revolves on its axis, while making a path around the sun, which in turn is in a rotating galaxy which is moving outward from the center of the universe. Regard this blackboard," he instructed, thumping the board. "To us it has not moved, but in reality it is a thousand miles or more from where it was one minute ago. You, sitting in that chair, have moved an unfathomable distance just in the time you have been sitting there. Understand?"
"I think so. But I'm still at the same point in space relative to other objects around me. At least on this planet."
Gustav smiled like a proud parent and said, "You are quick. You caught on to a very important factor which we will discuss in greater detail later." With a twinkle in his eye, Gustav repeated, "Later." He looked at Tony and said, "You are right. We cannot even think about anything without thinking of that fifth dimension."
"Fifth?" Jason asked. "What's the fifth dimension?"
"Time," Gustav pronounced importantly. "Time is the fifth dimension. Not only has this blackboard moved thousands of miles since we began talking, it has aged. This is not the same blackboard. You see this wooden frame? It has decayed just since we have been here. You and I cannot see it with our puny little eyes and even punier little brains, but it has."
Kerrigan jerked a thumb over his shoulder and asked, "So what does this have to do with what I just saw?"
"Tony?" Gustav offered.
As Kerrigan turned to Tony, the dark-skinned man told him, "What you saw was movement unencumbered by height, width and depth. Pure movement. And done so quickly as to make time itself seem inconsequential—though really it's not. The time involved just became imperceptible to our little minds because of the speed of movement."
Kerrigan stood up and told them, "I don't pretend to have any idea what we're talking about. I was a really good engineer in college. And while I studied how to design bridges that would stand the test of time—and I know how height width and depth play a role in the structure . . . what I'm curious about is what role I can possibly play in all this? I am not a physicist—or whatever you guys are. I'm just a simple engineer." Casting another glance at the device, he added, "Emphasis on the simple."
Gustav took him by the arm and began to lead him to the far end of the room, where there were large, hangar-like doors. As they walked, Gustav explained, "The mechanism is contained entirely within the silver object you saw, what we call the Extra-Dimensional Integrator, or Eddie. Yet, what happened to the cart it was strapped to when Eddie made his little trip?"
It seemed like a rhetorical question, but Kerrigan answered anyway, "It moved with it."
"Precisely. Now, we propose to attach Eddie to an aircraft. Such a device could end this war in days."
"How?" Jason asked, still reeling from the idea—however briefly it had been allowed to cross his mind—of an airplane with that thing attached to it. It occurred to him to wonder why you would even need something as slow as an airplane when you have that thing?
Tony answered, "A bomber takes off from here and fifteen minutes later delivers a payload anywhere in the world. Five minutes after that it is back here. How could anyone defense against that? Since there is not even a flight plan to defense against, it would be—literally—indefensible."
"That's what people thought about the crossbow," Kerrigan pointed out. "Let's say you're right, that it can end all the wars. I'm not sure I've even got the mental capacity to figure out the most rudimentary elements of something like that. Where does that put me—" He nodded as it came to him and he felt like an idiot for missing the point, "Test pilot."
They had come to the hangar doors, which Gustav opened just wide enough for them to pass through. Kerrigan looked up and his eyes became the size of quarters as he mumbled, "A Comal 40?"
"A 42, actually," Tony smiled, patting him on the back. "This is the best plane in the word even without Eddie. And you get to fly it."
Chapter Seven
Back at the officer's mess after an uneventful day of patrolling the skies over the river, watching the armies amass ground troupes but make no effort to cross over, Bronwyn and her new wingman were trying to get to know each other. It was awkward for both of them. She felt a twinge of disloyalty that she wasn't flying with the only other survivor of the 187th on the base and Carter felt odd flying with someone other than Captain Kerrigan for the first time in over a year. They had learned to anticipate each other and it was going to be hard to go through that learning stage again after once having it down so well.
Lieutenant Carter also admitted to himself that he was having a hard time having a female wingman—wingwoman, he thought. He came from a pretty strict family where the men protected the women and it just went against his grain to see women in combat at all—especially as a pilot and most especially as his partner. He had heard she was probably the best on the base, and that had also rankled him. He had always figured he was the second best after Kerrigan and only conceded that standing out of friendship.
But he had heard about her "double ace" status and he had seen the piece of metal they had taken off her plane where she had collided with someone else and lived to tell about it. And he had seen her flying skills over the last couple days. Still, it just didn't sit right with him. He w
as a soldier, though, and a darn good one and if this was what command dictated (and deep down he knew it was what the war dictated) then he would live with it.
"You got a girl back home, Carter?" In the officer's mess they dropped the titles, but had never been able to bring themselves to use first names.
He smiled, an unusual occurrence on his usually stern countenance, and replied, "Sure do. We're getting married as soon as I can get back."
"Back to Sweetwater?"
"Yeah," he nodded. Everyone knew where Lieutenant Carter was from because the name of his airplane was the "Sweetwater Swatter." Instead of the frighteningly proportioned women painted on the noses of most fighter craft, he had a painting of a fly swatter slapping the head of an enemy soldier. "Might head over to Abilene, though. Bigger city, more opportunity, you know? We'll see, though. I'm hoping I can get a post at one of the flight schools as an instructor after all this is over."
"What's her name?"
"Lillian. She's as pretty as they come. School teacher. Darn good one, too." Never very good at talking about such things, he changed the subject from himself by asking, "You got a guy out there somewhere?" He slapped his forehead and chuckled genuinely, "What am I saying? I saw the way you kissed the Captain goodbye. I guess he's your fella, huh?"
"Uh, no. That was just a moment's mis—misjudgement on my part. I was just swept up in the moment I guess."
"You started to say 'mistake', didn't you?" he smiled
She hesitated, then nodded. "Yeah. I mean, I have no indication that he in any way returns the feelings."
William Otto Carter the Second shrugged, then told her, "I think what would really be the mistake is if you felt that way and never told him. One way or another—I mean, whatever becomes of it—you're always better off having told the truth. Better to have told him and find out for sure that it's not returned than to live your life always wondering if it were returned and not knowing because you never told him."
She hadn't told him, she realized. She hadn't told him anything. All she had done was kiss him, which might mean all sorts of different things. Lust. Impetuousness. But not necessarily love. Love? She asked herself, immediately chastising herself for even thinking such a thought.
Now it was her turn to change the subject, so she quickly asked, "Have you flown one of those '34s with the '38 assembly? I don't care for it myself. I never flew an actual '34 until recently—we trained on '37s back at the flight school—so maybe this is an improvement, but I really didn't like it. It was kind of like when you're driving a car with a bad spare tire. It's better than the flat tire, but it's not as good as a—a good tire."
"I know what you mean. But I flew in one of the old '34s. First plane I had when I got to Crockett, as a matter of fact. This does beat the old assembly all to pieces. The thing I've learned you've got to remember is . . . "
"One thing I don't get," Kerrigan said as they fitted a copy of Eddie onto the Comal 42, "Is this: with the earth rotating and the galaxy spinning and the universe expanding and all, how come Eddie doesn't just disappear here and reappear out in space or in the middle of the sun or something?"
"Excellent question," Gustav nodded. "That was one of our early concerns as well. But then we realized that an object can be traveled through the fourth dimension relative to another object."
"In this case," Tony injected, "Relative to the center of the earth. We can establish that as a constant and work from there."
"What about mountains?" Jason asked. "Right now we're not as far from the center of the earth as I was a couple days ago when the train went over the Davis Mountains. So if I traveled to there with Eddie, would I be materializing about four thousand feet below the surface of the earth?"
"Precisely," Gustav nodded. Then he shook his head and explained, "I mean you are precisely right. Therefore, if we were to have to travel from—as you say—here to the Davis Mountains, we would have to account not only for southwestern movement from this point, but also an increase in elevation relative to the center of the earth."
"With precise calculations, Jason," Tony told him excitedly, "We could put a person on the sixteenth floor of the Excelsior Hotel in Houston and even pick the room we wanted him in."
"Wouldn't make the management too happy," Jason quipped. Seriously, he asked, "How far are we away from such calculations?"
Tony Hermisillo answered, "We could do them now. It's not that the calculations are so impossible, it's gathering the right factors to make the computations correct, if that makes sense." Realizing he hadn't made any sense, Tony amended, "For instance, we might know that a hotel here in town—the Drake, maybe—is fifteen feet between floors, starting at four feet above the ground, which is at 'x' feet above sea level. To do the calculations for landing a person in the Excelsior we'd need to know how many feet up from sea level the sixteenth floor is. They might have built it with the floors fourteen feet and eleven inches between floors. But if we were to be so foolish as to assume all hotels had evenly spaced floors, we would be sending someone to their death."
"Gotcha," Kerrigan nodded, looking at the Eddie he was helping to install in the airplane. It suddenly occurred to him, "Oh. So the reason for the airplane is that it gives us some leeway. I go up to five thousand feet above sea level and take what—in our normal reckoning of distance—would be a thirty mile trip and there's no chance I would materialize in a mountain because there's nothing over a thousand feet around here."
"Exactly," Tony told him with a pat on the back.
"What if I materialize in the same space as a duck?"
Tony and Gustav looked at each other, then back to Kerrigan before Gustav said, "It is not without risks."
Bronwyn watched the bomb she had dropped take out an armored troop carrier. She had no idea whether anyone were in the vehicle or not—and couldn't tell from the air—but she knew she had hit her target. She adeptly dropped the plane to just above the terrain and successfully dodged the anti-aircraft guns and, presumably, the radar.
No radar had been spotted south of the border, but they had a good idea there was some in place somewhere. Either that, or the anti-aircraft gunners were the best on the planet.
When her patrol was over, she landed the Comal 38 that joined a potato truck and a motorcycle as the only surviving pieces of equipment from Crockett safely at Marathon. The runways there had been repaired in short order and were actually better than they had been before the bombing—and longer, now that there were heavy bombers taking off and landing every day. Her left landing gear had locked up briefly the day before but she had done just what she had suggested Jason try and it had worked perfectly. Upon landing, the mechanics had checked over her hydraulics system and quickly replaced it.
She pulled into her assigned space on the flight line and a ladder was quickly attached to her plane to allow her easier egress than jumping onto the wing then down to the ground. As she descended the ladder she thanked the corporal holding the ladder—a man who was actually twice her age but had recently joined the military along with his college-graduated son. She made it a point to try to learn something about everyone she worked with, but especially those whose rank put her over them. Not only did it help them like her, she found herself beginning to care about them. Bronwyn saluted the corporal smartly, then took off her leather helmet and began walking toward the flight tower. With a thumbs up, which she returned, Lieutenant Carter headed for the command center.
"Excellent work, Captain," General McIntyre told her with a salute. "I can't imagine we can hold on to you much longer."
"Why is that?" Bronwyn asked suspiciously.
McIntyre quickly smiled and said, "Oh, don't worry. I haven't heard anything. I'm just saying a person with your skills—and recent promotion, I might add—is bound to be taken away from me just when I need her. This front isn't viewed as being as important as the war in the Atlantic by some of the brass."
"I'll go where I need to go," Bronwyn shrugged.
"I k
new you'd say that." He seemed to see someone behind her and said, "Ah, there's someone I would like for you to meet, Lieutenant—Captain."
Bronwyn turned to find a tall woman—almost six foot, Bronwyn guessed—with short black hair and a pilot's swagger coming over. She looked to be in her late thirties, although the scowl she had on her face made her appear older than she probably was. Bronwyn smiled and extended her hand in a friendly fashion but the woman shook it as if she would rather have ignored the gesture. As if she were only taking the hand because the general were watching.
McIntyre introduced, "Captain Bronwyn Dalmouth, this Major Lucille Ambrose. She's the pilot of that big L-115 bomber you saw roll in this morning. She and her crew have been sent here to shore up our defenses against a ground attack."
"Pleased to meet you," Bronwyn said happily, though she had already sensed the coolness of her newest acquaintance.
Major Ambrose said, "The pleasure's mine," with much the same inflection as one would use to say, "I have a terrible rash." She looked at the general and asked, "You wanted to see me, sir?"
General McIntyre, somehow oblivious to the cool exchange, beamed and said, "I just thought the Captain could show you around the post and the town—such as it is. If you don't mind, Captain?"
"No sir, I don't mind. I would like to clean up, first. Get out of this flight suit."
"Certainly, certainly," he nodded.
Guessing the ball was now in her court, Bronwyn turned to the major and asked, "I'm supposed to meet Major Sherman at the officer's mess at," she looked at her watch, "Fifteen-thirty. She's the lead surgeon here. Would you care to join us and go from there?"
"Certainly," the major replied. She saluted both the other officers and then turned on her heels and walked crisply away.
The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 3): Lost Time Page 11