by Bob Mayer
He was still trying to figure out a way to escape this female ambush, when one of the women spoke in perfect English: “You are an odd man, Roland.”
“And, as if the Devil himself had decided their torments were insufficient, above the wind's howl and the inferno's roar came the interminable, agonized screams of the victims being roasted alive.”
—Victor Gregg, survivor Dresden Firebombing
Dresden, Germany, 14 February 1945 A.D.
DOC WASN’T THERE, and then he was there, but he’d always sort of been there. It was the best way to explain how he arrived, becoming part of his current time and place without fanfare or excitement, which was irrelevant, since he was surrounded by frozen death. He was in the bubble of this day, not before, and hopefully he wouldn’t be here afterward because without refrigeration, the rows and rows of slaughtered cattle on hooks would certainly begin to rot. And the power was going to fail very soon.
Doc knew that would pale in comparison with the odor of tens of thousands of humans burned up in the raid that was winging its way towards Dresden. He looked around a strung up carcass, searching for other POWs, but there was no one in sight. The slaughterhouse was lit by a few bulbs strung along electrical wires in the rafters.
Doc frowned. Something was wrong with that. Then he realized he was on the surface level of the slaughterhouse complex, where the meat was shipped. Safety from the coming raid lay in the storage below ground.
How much time did he have before the incendiary bombs began falling?
While the bubbles the Shadow punched in time lasted no more than 24 hours, they sometimes lasted less. It was dark outside, based on the lack of light along the edges of the blackout curtains lining the tall windows in the brick walls of the slaughterhouse. The fact the windows were intact was a testament to Dresden’s exemption from previous bombing raids.
Where were the guards?
Doc cocked his head, listening. Voices. Speaking German. Doc crept among the dangling carcasses until he could see a large, open loading door. Several Germans, rifles slung, stood on the wooden dock, peering at the night sky.
There was the sound of an approaching aircraft, just one, its engines a faint drone. One of the soldiers put his rifle to his shoulder and made shooting noises, the others laughing.
A Christmas tree shaped green flare popped alight high in the sky.
The soldiers seemed puzzled, discussing what it could be.
Doc knew. Edith’s download had all the deadly details. The flare was a Target Indicator, dropped by a twin-engined Mosquito marker plane. In the distance a red one ignited and then several more over the city.
It is 1945 A.D.. A German test pilot dies in the first vertical test flight of a manned rocket; Going My Way wins best picture at the Oscars; George S. Patton dies from injuries received in a car accident; Churchill resigns as Prime Minister after being defeated in the popular election; American troops occupy the southern part of Korea while Soviet troops occupy the northern part—this will have repercussions; Franklin D. Roosevelt dies; Ernie Pyle dies on Okinawa; the United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and 3 days later, another on Nagasaki; World War II officially ends on 1 September with the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay; the United States joins the United Nations; the Wilhelm Gustloff is torpedoed and sinks, killing an estimated 10,000 on board—the greatest loss of life in a single ship sinking; Eddie Slovak is executed for desertion, the first, and last, American soldier to be executed for this offense since the Civil War; Anne Frank dies; Oral penicillin is introduced; Werner Von Braun and other German rocket scientists surrender to the Americans; the Yalta Conference with Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill; MacArthur returns to the Philippines; Five Grumman TBM Avengers in Flight 19 disappear on a training mission in what would be called the Bermuda Triangle; a group of Marines reach the top of Mount Suribachi and raise the U.S. flag.
From Edith’s timetable, Doc knew he had twenty-three minutes before the first wave of heavy bombers started dropping their incendiary bombs and Dresden began to burn.
Some things change; some don’t.
“Who are you?”
Doc spun about. A man wearing olive drab fatigues and a bedraggled field jacket was walking toward him.
“They call me Doc.”
The man stopped, looking past, out the loading door and soldiers and then up into the sky. “What’s that?”
“Target Indicator,” Doc said. “And you are?”
“Sergeant Vonnegut.” He looked at Doc. “You’re different. Not like the others.”
“What others?” Doc asked.
“The Angels who came to me.”
Doc tensed. Valkyries, agents of the Shadow, were often taken as angels by people who met them.
“What did the Angels say?” Doc asked.
Vonnegut pointed toward the open door. “That they would come for me when the way was lighted.”
As he tried to walk past, Doc put his arm out, blocking him. “Hold on. It’s not safe out there.”
“But the lights are here!”
Vonnegut was possessed, determined to go outside.
Between the guards and the bombers en-route, it was suicidal. Doc tackled Vonnegut, both of them tumbling to the slaughterhouse floor.
The sky lit up as the first pattern of incendiary bombs detonated. Mixed in were the heavy thuds and concussive waves of the ‘cookies’; 4,000 pound high explosive bombs also known as blockbusters, designed to wipe out entire buildings and blow the windows and doors out of surrounding buildings, making them more susceptible to fire. These heavier bombs, Edith’s download informed Doc as he struggled with Vonnegut, were also designed to take out water mains, hampering fire fighting. Cruelty layered on top of destruction.
None of this was in the immediate vicinity, but Doc knew the British, who bombed at night with their Lancasters, were just getting started. And once daylight came, the Americans would follow with their Flying Fortresses.
It was fortunate for Doc that Vonnegut had been a prisoner since the Battle of the Bulge the previous December, because he was weak from his meager POW diet.
Someone was yelling in German.
Doc looked up. One of the guards was pointing a rifle at the two of them, gesturing to move.
“We have to get underground,” Doc yelled at Vonnegut, letting go of him and struggling to his feet. “This whole city is going to be an inferno!”
A blockbuster thundered nearby and the entire building shook.
Another guard was behind Vonnegut, unseen by the perhaps-future author. He raised his rifle in a way Doc had seen in the pits at Camp Mackall during training—to smash the butt of it into the back of Vonnegut’s skull.
Doc rushed forward, shoving Vonnegut aside.
The last thing he saw was the butt of the rifle coming for his head.
And then darkness fell.
“Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans—every thing in short but the enchantress of numbers.” Charles Babbage reference the Countess of Lovelace, the first to create the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. In 1840. Before the machine to use the algorithm had even been invented.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 14 February 1946
MOMS WASN’T THERE, and then she was there, but she’d sort of always been there. It was the best way to explain how she arrived, becoming part of her current time and place without fanfare or excitement among those around her. She was in the bubble of this day, not before, and hopefully she wouldn’t be here afterward.
There was also no fanfare because she was in a bathroom, standing in front of a cracked mirror. There was no one else in the room, which was easy to determine because the stalls had no doors on them. The bathroom was cold, drafty and one of the sinks kept up a steady drip that Moms instinctively knew couldn’t be stopped.
Moms went to the door, creaked it open, and peered into the hallway. Also empty. She accessed the download for a schematic of
the building in which ENIAC was housed and oriented herself. The woman’s bathroom, the only one in the entire building, was, of course, the most remote. An afterthought in a previously all male domain.
Moms exited, went along the hall to a fire exit, and then descended a level to the main floor.
She pushed open a door and paused. The room in front of her was filled with the mainframe of a computer, which had less capacity than the pocket-sized satphone she’d left behind in the team locker room. The walls were lined with computer consoles, hundreds of cables looping along the front of them, dozens and dozens of white lights flickering.
It appeared to be chaos, but Moms knew from the download that making sense of that chaos was the work of the ENIAC six. A door swung open and a group of women walked in, one of them carrying a large cardboard box which she carried to a table in the middle of the room. She tipped it slightly and a slew of red and green Ping-Pong balls bounced out.
It is 1946. In a speech in Missouri, Winston Churchill mentions an Iron Curtain descending in Europe; the Japanese General who commanded the Death March is executed; Syria becomes independent of France; the first American V-2 is launched at White Sands; at Los Alamos, Louis Slotin receives a fatal dose of radiation from the Demon Core; a Jewish terrorist group bombs the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 90, mostly British personnel; the first Tupperware is sold; in the last reported mass lynching in the United States two African-American couples are killed in Georgia; the first theme park opens in the United States, nine years before Disneyland, called Santa Claus Land; Indian Prime Minister Nehru asks the United States and Soviet Union to stop nuclear testing to save humanity—India would have its first bomb in 1974; Mensa is founded by two guys who think they’re smart; Hermann Goring poisons himself two hours before his scheduled execution; a war starts in Vietnam between the Viet Minh and the French, which will end eight years later at Dien Bien Phu (at least for the French); Muslims and Hindus battle in the Week of the Long Knives in India leaving over 3,000 dead.
One of the women picked up a small white ball and threw it across the room. “If this is all he thinks we’re good for, I say we quit.” The ball bounced against one of the computer consoles, then back, rolling to a stop.
Some things change; some don’t.
“I agree,” one of the others said. “We keep talking and talking, but we have to make a stand.”
The other women had knives and were slicing Ping-Pong balls in half.
“You can keep yapping or you can help,” one of the slicers said. “Sooner we get this done, the sooner we get out of here. We have to be back early in the morning to get ready for the press. I’d like to get some shut-eye.”
“It is what it is,” another slicer said and Moms felt a pang at those words, used so easily to dismiss that which shouldn’t be. “Nothing’s changed and nothing is going to change.”
Was this just about stopping the women from quitting? Moms wondered. The machine was going to be publicly displayed tomorrow, so they’d already done the work. The download informed her that the ENIAC Six were needed even after that, though. They were the only ones who could continue to program it and, more importantly, find and quickly repair one of the thousands of vacuum tubes, which burnt out on a regular basis.
The mystery of the sliced Ping-Pong balls was solved when one of the women who’d been complaining took several pieces over to one of the machines and glued a piece over one of the white lights.
“Just like those blinking lights in those terrible science fiction movies,” the woman said, holding the piece in place, letting the glue dry. “Which of those brainiacs thought of this?”
“Someone in public affairs,” another said. “Dog and pony show.”
“Which are we?” another asked.
The half Ping-Pong cover made it look more, well, whatever. High speed for 1946. A task given to the women to do as if they were just secretaries rather than a key component of the entire operation. Moms stomped down on her Betty Friedan moment, given that The Feminine Mystique was still 17 years out, and focused on the here and now. Why was she here?
She remembered Scout’s mission to UCLA in 1969, the evening the first Internet message was sent. The Shadow had sent two agents, a double-blind to trap Scout, but they’d also placed a bomb to blow up the lab.
Crude, but effective, if it had worked.
Moms checked the download, going over the schematic of the building. She grimaced as she remembered all the classes Mac had taught the team back at the Ranch outside Area 51 on explosives and how to emplace them in order to do the most damage. Mac was gone now, disappeared on the D-Day, 1944 mission. A troubled man, she hoped he had found some peace before the end, whatever that had been.
Moms went to the stairwell and went up to check the room above the main computer lab. A great place to emplace a shaped charge designed to explode downward, taking out whoever was in the room and the equipment.
She pushed open a door, entering a room with the same dimensions as the lab on the lower floor. It was full of discarded tables, desks, chairs, filing cabinets and other school debris. It was dim, just a few naked light bulbs casting shadows among the furniture. Moms wove her way through, checking left and right.
She wasn’t overly surprised when she saw the bomb, a large steel box, approximately four feet to a side and two feet high, emplaced between two desks.
The red digital countdown read :30 and, as she watched, switched to :29.
‘St. Valentine is the Patron Saint of affianced couples, bee keepers, engaged couples, epilepsy, fainting, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, plague, travellers, and young people. He is represented in pictures with birds and roses and his feast day is celebrated on February 14.’ Catholic Online
Italy, 14 February 278 A.D.
SCOUT WASN’T THERE, and then she was there, but she’d sort of always been there. It was the best way to explain how she arrived, becoming part of her current time and place without fanfare or excitement among those around her, which wasn’t hard because she became aware of the here and now on a riverbank, underneath a bridge, foul-smelling water just a few feet away.
She was in the bubble of this day, not before, and hopefully she wouldn’t be here afterward. Because it smelled bad and she knew they didn’t have hot showers in 278 AD. She’d never truly appreciated the small things of daily living in her time until she’d traveled back.
She could hear people, the clatter of hooves on stones, the creak of wagon wheels moving.
The river was the Tiber and she was on the northern edge of the city, where the Via Flamina crossed. If it stunk this bad, she wondered what it was like downstream?
Scout knew she needed to go up there, find out what was happening, but she really didn’t feel like it. History said someone would get beheaded today and she was here to make sure history was right. She didn’t see any upside.
It is 278 A.D. Probus reorganizes defenses along the Rhine River after expelling the Franks from Gaul; Rome besieges Cremna; Maxentius, who would be Emperor of Rome one day, is born—he would die, here, at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312; his body would be pulled from the river and his head cut off and displayed by Constantine.
“You’re early.”
Scout recognized the voice: Pandora.
Some things change; some don’t.
Scout turned and faced the ‘goddess’. “What do you want?”
Pandora stood next to the bridge’s buttress, dressed in a green robe cinched at the waist with an ornate gold belt. She had a Naga staff in one hand: blade on one end, seven-headed snake pommel on the other. She was tall and thin, with thick black hair, divided by a single streak of white from above her left, straight back and ending behind her left shoulder.
“Is that any way to say hello to an old friend?” Pandora asked. “We last met, let me think, ah yes, in Greece. I forget the year.”
“I doubt that,” Scout said.
“Three-sixty-two BC,” Pandora said
, “or the more politically correct BCE.”
Scout took a step toward her. “See? Why try to BS me?”
Pandora laughed. “Touché. Nice. But the important question isn’t what I want, it’s why are you here? Now? That’s what I meant when I said that you’re early. This place isn’t important for another thirty-four years and in October.”
Edith’s download supplied the answer: The Battle of Milvian Bridge.
“This is where and when the bubble is,” Scout said. “What are you doing here?”
“Trying to understand,” Pandora said. “Why do you think you’re here?”
“Saint Valentine,” Scout said.
“You shouldn’t be here and now,” Pandora said.
Scout spread her hands. “It’s a Shadow bubble. It’s opening bubbles on other Fourteen Februaries. This is mine.” Scout began to walk by Pandora to scramble up to the roadway to see what was happening, but Pandora put her free hand out and stopped her.
“This is wrong. You being here. Now. That’s why I’m here. Saint Valentine? How could that cause a ripple, never mind a Cascade? There were several Valentines; even the Church named four. A myth coalesced through literature a millennium later.”
Scout had begun to push against Pandora’s arm, but she stopped. “So why am I here?”
“I can only deduce it’s because the Shadow wants you here.”
The Possibility Palace
Where? Can’t Tell You. When? Can’t Tell You.
In the spiraling labyrinth of the outer edge of the Pit of the Possibility Palace, Lara strolled downward, passing by the analysts sitting at their bland desks, studying scrolls and other documents. Most didn’t spare her a glance.
Lara briefly wondered what kind of life they had outside of the Pit? Then wondered why she wondered. She didn’t know who they were or where they came from. For that matter, she had no idea when they came from.