“You don’t have brain cancer, do you?” she asked the weeping woman. Nina’s question sounded like an acknowledgement, more than any inquiry.
Lydia shook her head slowly from side to side, feeling an immense measure of relief to finally be able to tell someone.
“What do you mean?” Sam asked Nina.
“Jesus, Sam, you can be so slow sometimes,” Nina sighed. She turned her attention to Lydia, who repeatedly breathed out deep sighs as she embraced her renewed release. The historian studied Lydia’s condition with her eyes. With great concern and sympathy she asked, “Professor, is this going to happen to Purdue when he comes back through that…” she motioned to the chamber, “…doorway?”
Sam suddenly realized. “Wait, this is not a terminal illness, it is the effects of the Tesla Experiment?” He was astonished.
“Yes,” Lydia admitted. “You can’t exactly tell people you suffer from Time Travel Syndrome or whatever when you look like shit. I’m not even fifty yet and I look like a monster. So I cried cancer, and nobody batted an eyelid because it was a monster they knew. People don’t like things they can’t explain or prove, and they don’t like people they cannot classify to put them at ease. If they think you have a terminal illness you have their permission to be broken.”
“So the figure Albert Tägtgren saw going up in flames at CERN… that was you?” Sam asked. At the mention of the engineer’s name his stomach sank, but he kept a straight face that hid his thoughts.
“That was me. But we did not film that one for the record, simply because it was so — unexpected,” Lydia smiled bitterly. “I activated the particle fields with the capacitors in the container under Alice, because they were so much stronger than the type I had at my disposal. I never thought it would function; not in practice! It was not supposed to do anything but provide me with a tremendous electrical current so that I could test Tesla’s accuracy on the prescribed amount of force.”
“So what went wrong? Or right, perhaps?” Nina asked.
“Sound interfered,” Lydia replied plainly. “Just the one element I did not calculate because it wasn’t part of the experiment. The Tesla Experiment was mainly to measure the probability of the various components involved to produce the adequate voltage and acceleration to thrust the energy beam with enough force,” she explained. “But the alarm went off in that section just as the force field achieved enough power. So, with the decibels of the alarm exceeding the threshold of the frequency it sounded on, the teleforce experiment resulted in an inadvertent discovery altogether.”
“So instead of testing a prospective ray gun the unexpected alarm caused time travel?” Nina asked in amazement. Lydia chuckled foolishly at the wonderfully simplified truth that sounded absolutely ludicrous.
“Strange, isn’t it? And that is why I was adamant to obtain the original notes Nikola Tesla made on the so-called ‘death ray’ while I was… well, away. At least then I could build the machine he envisioned, not some apparatus devised by guesswork.”
“Unbelievable!” I mean that,” Nina exclaimed in wonder. She hated admitting it to herself, but she saw Lydia Jenner in a completely different light now. No longer did she feel angry at Lydia’s pursuit of the elusive notes. If her body was ravaged so utterly by an accident of physics, the least she could do was to use the discovered method to procure the original plan. It only bothered her that Purdue was the one scouting for it.
“And how did you come back, then?” Sam asked her, surreptitiously recording the story she told. “Surely you did not have the proper device, because you had not invented it yet.”
“You’re right,” Lydia said. “I have to admit to my disgrace that I used seduction to get around while I was there. I met Helmut at a symposium relating to Armaments and when I mentioned Tesla’s work on charged particle beam weapons, he bragged about having confiscated materials from Tesla’s room after his death in 1943.”
Sam was amused by her resourcefulness. “So you seduced him,” he smiled.
“Seduced him? Honey, I rode him bareback,” she winked, evoking their laughter at her forwardness. Her merry relation withered to a reminiscence of regret. “But I was there for far longer than I surmised, you see. That is partly why I ended up decaying physically like this. I lingered there for too long, so to speak. You see, within the ether there is no chronological order and so every destination visited by a traveler would hold a different rate of cellular regression, that which we call time.”
“Aging?” Sam asked. “But you don’t look old, just…”
“Sick,” she nodded. “Think of it as a desert storm.”
Sam looked as confused as Nina, but both were intrigued. Nina had forgotten about Purdue’s predicament by now and Sam was worried about his memory card running out of space before Professor Jenner was done explaining.
“A desert storm? Do tell,” Sam pressed.
“Well, imagine your body is a landscape of flat and loose sand, like a desert. Now imagine that one droplet of water falls for every day of your life,” Lydia described slowly.
“I’m with you,” Sam acknowledged.
Lydia continued, “Right. Now. What happened to me while in the ether — and the two days I spent with Helmut — is the equivalent of a rainstorm on my desert. Each particle of radiation, each cosmic ray, existent duration, thermal fluctuation, and so on and so forth, collided with and eroded the cellular aspects of my anatomy.”
“Jesus,” Nina whispered sympathetically.
“By the time I finally found my way back I arrived in the chamber, barely alive from cellular deterioration,” Lydia shrugged. Carefully she rolled back her sleeves to reveal seared skin tissue. “The intense electrical current that facilitates entry into the ether ‘highway’ literally causes combustion, but fortunately it happens so rapidly that it rarely singes deeper than the epidermis.”
“Oh, good!” Nina gasped. “Well, at least that’s lucky.”
Lydia gave Nina a weary leer and shook her head. “Your sarcasm is not welcome, Dr. Gould.”
Sam chuckled at the banter between the ladies. Unlike their previous exchanges a milder, more amicable mood prevailed.
Chapter 23
“With respect, Frau Orsic, the man is insane. I can believe a scientifically possible stance, but really, to tell the future? It is madness! Not to mention that by such a claim he is ridiculing the acumen of the Waffen-SS and the High Command in general,” Sturmbannführer Diekmann argued with Maria.
He was busy preparing for his company to move out toward Haute-Vienne and had only reported briefly in Berlin before rejoining the mobilization. As commander of the Waffen-SS, 1st Battalion, he would soon join his men in Southern France to help stop the Allied advance. Sturmbannführer Diekmann’s battalion was part of the 4th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment (“Der Führer”) that served with the invasion of France.
“Please, Sturmbannführer, you have to listen to me. Sigrun and I both saw something unbelievable take place right in front of our eyes and Herr Purdue was its architect. Both the Führer and Reichsführer Himmler have agreed that you are to take Herr Purdue with you to the front,” she retorted forcefully.
Adolf Diekmann was not about to be ordered around by a mere civilian woman with no significance in the Waffen-SS. He stepped forward, standing inches from Maria and sneered, “Let’s get one thing straight. You might be a famous medium who runs one of our secret societies, talking to ghosts and channeling extra-terrestrial beings and I don’t know what else, but if the Führer wishes me to dance to your puppetry, my dear, he would have to issue the order himself.”