Rasta Man took a deep breath and then slowly let it out. “Okay.” Then, with renewed energy he swung back to his desk and plugged Langley’s laptop into one of his many computer towers and began pressing buttons. “It’ll take a few minutes to get ready to make the hack.”
“Take your time,” Langley replied. “Do you have another machine I can use? I want to follow up on another lead.”
“Sure.” With a tap of another keyboard, another of Rasta’s many plasma screens lit up.
“All I need is an internet connection.”
“There,” he said, with one hand opening a basic internet connection on Langley’s allocated machine while continuing his own efforts. Langley sat down and typed USS ELDRIDGE into the search bar. It was the name of the ship Mrs Braun had said her husband had served on which she believed had triggered his emotional problems and his interest in radioactive related illnesses.
“Whoa, you’re really getting into this conspiracy theory stuff, mon,” Rasta said, peering momentarily at the results screen.
“What do you mean?”
“First hacking into Phoenix, then researching the Philly Experiment.”
“The what?”
Rasta paused what he was doing and looked at him. He nodded at the screen. “The Philadelphia Experiment,” he explained. “Don’t you know what you’re looking at?”
“Enlighten me.”
“Okay,” he returned to what he was doing on his own computer but spoke as if he were making a cup of tea rather than preparing to hack the Department of Defense’s firewall. “You really should read my blog, you know.”
“Rasta,” he urged.
Rasta Man seemed excited now as he recited what he knew. “The Philadelphia Experiment is one of the holy grails of conspiracy theorists,” he explained. “Of course, the government’s covered it all up, just like they did with Roswell and JFK, but I got evidence that it really happened.”
“What happened?”
“In the latter half of 1943, while in the Philadelphia Harbour Naval Yard, the USS Eldridge, a newly commissioned destroyer, took part in an experimental procedure. Some people reckon it was to test a new faster-than-light engine, others say it was to make it impervious to mines and torpedoes, others say it was to render it totally invisible. The other theory is that the U.S. Government was experimenting with time-travel.”
“Time travel?” Langley gasped. Somehow, he had expected to hear that, yet it still came as a shock. Nevertheless, he knew to take Rasta’s claims with a pinch of salt.
“The ship was fitted with two massive 75 KVA generators, connected to magnetic Tesla coils on the main deck where the weapons turrets should have been.”
Tesla coils, Langley repeated in his mind, linking back to the evidence King had presented him about Tesla’s involvement with the Moon Mask.
“There were three 2 megawatt RF transmitters, three thousand power amplifier tubes, special synchronizing and modulation circuits, and a whole shit-load of other stuff. All the most state-of-the-art technology of the time.”
Langley felt like asking how the hell he knew all this but he knew now wasn’t the time to question his theory, only to listen.
“All the equipment was designed to generate massive electromagnetic fields to bend light and radio waves around the ship,” he explained. “On July 22they powered the generators up, a green mist enveloped the ship and then both the mist and the ship vanished — totally. It wasn’t visible on radar or to the naked eye. Fifteen minutes later they shut the generators down and the ship reappeared. But,” he added ominously, “there was a problem. When the ship was boarded, its entire crew was suffering from severe vomiting and disorientation. I reckon it was the effects of radiation poisoning.”
Langley kept his poker face in place while secretly he was reeling. Time travel. Radiation poisoning. Could this experiment have been responsible for the course that Emmett Braun’s life had taken?
“Nevertheless,” Rasta continued, still tapping away at his keyboard, “a few months later, on October 28, they performed the experiment again. Only this time, instead of fading into a green mist, there was an explosion of blue light and bam!” he slapped his hands together, startling Langley. “The ship was gone.” He paused dramatically. “At exactly the same time, the crew of the S.S. Andrew Furuseth, hundreds of miles away, in Norfolk, Virginia, reported seeing a similar flash of blue light, preceded by the appearance of a United States destroyer. Several minutes later, another flash of light, and the ship vanished from Norfolk and reappeared in Philadelphia.”
It was a sensational story but, despite what he had learned so far, Langley was having a hard time swallowing it. “Did the crew suffer from radiation sickness again?”
Rasta stopped what he was doing altogether and stared long and hard at Langley. “It was much worse the second time around. The crew was violently sick, puking up blood and their own liquefied organs. Some were covered in horrific burns, others had gone nuts, wandering around like madmen. Others had vanished altogether and have never been seen since. But worse,” he concluded ominously, “some of the crew had become fused to the ship’s bulkheads, their bodies literally welded into the metal.”
Get them out! Langley remembered Mrs Braun’s dramatic retelling of her husband’s night terrors. Could it be? Was he screaming to get people melded into the bulkheads of a naval ship out? He could certainly appreciate how such horrors could guide a man’s life; some descended into madness, others, like Braun, grew from their experiences and tried to put right the wrongs they had seen.
“The government covered it all up of course; a falsified report to make out the Eldridge was nowhere near Philadelphia; that the crew members who’d died or vanished had been killed while fighting the Japanese; but they never gave up with their studies. The experiments continue to this day. Theories abound. Most people think that Einstein’s Unified Field Theory — which, coincidentally, was classified top secret at the same time that he was working for the DOD on ‘unrelated issues’, is the key to the whole process. I think Project Rainbow, which is the project that ran the Philadelphia Experiment, was also part and parcel of the Manhattan Project.”
Langley hadn’t seen that one coming. He knew that the Manhattan Project was the name of the secret work that had been carried out in the forties on the development of the A-bomb, culminating in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “How so?” he asked.
“You want to know what I think went wrong on the Eldridge? I think the U.S. Government affectively developed the technology to travel back in time, using the theories of the great thinkers of the time, Tesla and Einstein. They were also developing a power source big enough to power the enormous energy needed to create a stable wormhole through space-time — the power of the atom. After the failure of Philadelphia, they focused on turning that power source into a bomb, which they dropped on Japan. But that wasn’t their plan originally. Blowing Japan off the face of the planet wasn’t enough. Nuclear power isn’t powerful enough to generate the energy needed to stabilise what happened to the Eldridge. But if it had been, they would have used it to wage temporal war against Japan, and Germany and all their enemies of the day.”
“Temporal war?”
“Think about it,” the hacker was enraptured in his own narrative now. He didn’t get out much. “Why settle for blowing the crap out of an enemy with nuclear bombs, if you can travel back in time and manipulate events in your favour before they become an enemy? The technology is out there… all they need is the power source.”