Now, given what you’ve been saying about this device, is it possible that this base was built for a single purpose — to hide and safeguard the U-Boat and the weapon or wormhole machine or whatever it is?”
Durand and Jameson both nodded.
“It certainly explains the location and the rudimentary facilities,” Jameson added.
“I know this sounds way out there,” Coulson continued hesitantly, “but is it possible that the U-Boat looks like it’s fresh out of dry dock because… well, it is? Like it was transported from 1945 to now using whatever that Bell thing does to make that happen?”
Juan looked enquiringly at Leah. For a former quantum physicist she wasn’t participating as much in the discussion as he would have expected.
“Anything’s possible, I guess. But time travel? Really? That’s quite a leap,” said Leah.
“You haven’t seen inside that boat,” Jack replied, “it’s uncanny. Everything works. The batteries are charged. The electric engines got us in here, didn’t they? If anyone else can tell me how a 1945 U-Boat can do that, I’m all ears.”
Nobody offered an explanation.
“How did it end up in the ice shelf, above sea level?” Sam asked the question before Jack had time to ask it himself.
Leah nodded her head slightly and raised her hand to quiet the debate while she thought through what Sam had just said. “Sam might be on to something,” she said.
Sam grinned like he’d just made a scientific breakthrough himself.
“Time, speed and space,” Leah proffered. She’d tried not to buy into the argument, but like the genie the former quantum physicist in her wouldn’t be put back in the bottle.
“I didn’t even make it through college. You’re going to have to fill in some blanks,” Sam admitted.
“Did you ever see the original Planet of the Apes movie? Charlton Heston comes back to earth from a space mission and the planet is being run by apes, right? Well that is a Hollywood take on the Einstein’s theory. Time passes slower the faster you travel toward the speed of light. So for an astronaut travelling in space at the speed of light time will pass slower than it will on earth. When he returns to Earth it could, in theory be years or even hundreds of years in the future in earth time, depending how long he’s travelled at the speed of light.”
“But that’s just a theory. Nobody’s ever travelled at the speed of light,” Jack challenged.
“True,” Leah agreed, “but it’s more than a theory. The GPS satellites that orbit the earth rely on precise synchronization between their onboard clocks and clocks on the ground to provide accurate navigation data. The speed at which they travel in orbit and the effect of gravity on the satellite mean that the clocks onboard the satellite have to be calibrated to ‘tick’ at a different rate in order to sync with earth based clocks. Relativity isn’t a theory, it’s a real thing,” Leah concluded.
“And that explains the U-Boat in the ice pack, how exactly?” asked Sam, his eyes glazing over in confusion.
Leah’s eyes blazed with enthusiasm as she continued her lecture, “NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite was launched in the 1980’s to measure the speed at which we were hurtling through space as a result of the big bang theory.”
“Like the TV show?” Sam asked excitedly.
Jack leaned over and cuffed him on the back of his oversized ginger head.
“Over eight hundred and seventy thousand miles an hour.” Leah paused to let that sink in. That’s how fast we are travelling, in addition to the speed we travel around the sun on our annual orbit plus the speed the earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours.”
Blank stares greeted her as she surveyed her audience.
“Don’t you get it?”
Plainly nobody got it.
“If that U-Boat went into the future back in 1945 and if the other end of the wormhole spat it out in 2017, then the earth would not be in the same place that it was when the U-Boat went into the wormhole, so it’s not surprising that it ended up where it did. In fact, where it ended up more or less proves that it actually did travel through time.”
The faces surrounding her looked totally confounded.
“The Nazi’s actually created a machine capable of time travel and they sent the device and the U-Boat it was housed in, into the future which is right now, and they did it way back in 1945!”
Jack had only one question.
“Why?”
But nobody heard him over the screams that echoed through the ice fortress and the sound of automatic gunfire hitting the hull of the Barracuda.
Chapter 31
A worm of blood escaped Kapitänleutnant Helmut Sohler’s nose, falling onto a faded black and white photograph with well-worn edges. The small wedding photograph was all he had to remind him of his beautiful bride, Helene who he had married in a rushed ceremony the night before receiving his orders to report to the U-2532.
With a baby on the way, Sohler insisted on doing the proper thing by both of them but now he was seeing the chances of holding his son or daughter in his arms slipping away by the hour.
He wiped away the blood with the back of his hand and spat the foul taste of copper from his mouth. Whatever that thing was discharging, the lead walls the shipyard had been ordered to fit to the compartment weren’t enough to stop it. Half the crewmen were dead already and the other half not too far behind.
Yet Kammler appeared totally immune to the device. The man wasn’t human. Day after day he worked on his machine in the lead box. Every so often he’d order all of the generators to be started and he’d man the control station on the dock which was tethered to the device with a myriad of thick electrical cables.
Nothing seemed to happen but they were all too sick to care one way or another. Hair fell out in clumps, blood hemorrhaged from every orifice and flesh sloughed from their bodies at the slightest touch, leaving gaping, oozy wounds that refused to heal. For many, death didn’t come soon enough.
Sohler felt blessed to have stayed away from the compartment as much as he was able. That probably bought him some time. Time enough to finish his log entries before trying to stop the madness.
No, Kammler wasn’t human at all. He was a monster, the manifestation of the vilest evil. The madman beamed with pride when he’d explained his grand plan to restore Germany to its rightful place on the world stage. His death camps were no more than a small scale experiment. A few million prisoners were nothing compared to the scale he envisaged with his huge ethnic ‘cleansing’ factories.
If the general’s madness went unchecked and if his hideous plan were allowed to succeed, the world would plunge into blackness and never recover. The Thousand Year Reich they had all proudly dreamed of at the start of the war would be defiled and corrupted. If Kammler had his way, it would become a thousand year pandemic, destroying the world as he knew it. His wife and child…
The lunatic had to be stopped.
Of course, like so many others, Sohler was convinced that Kammler intended to turn the tables on their enemies with the use of a weapon everyone thought couldn’t be built — an atomic bomb.
What he didn’t know was that the truth was even more chilling and horrific than that.